Re:Introducing extended line endings support in Notepad
by mark-r on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @05:00PM
(#17025045)
The standard line ending of the '70s was CR/LF, because the printers commonly used as interactive terminals required them both. I wonder how that worked on the first Unix systems?
Re:Introducing extended line endings support in Notepad
by cesarb on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @09:31PM
(#17026806)
> I wonder how that worked on the first Unix systems?
Probably the same way it still works on today's Unix systems: it converts NL to CR+NL on output. See the manpage for the stty command:
Output settings:
[-]onlcr
translate newline to carriage return-newline
The standard line ending format in the '60s, which was the height of the mainframe era, would probably have been the newline character in IBM's EBCIDC encoding, which differs from the value used for ASCII (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline). Unix didn't really start taking off until around the early '80s IIRC.
Windows properly supported the newline format for its platform of lineage (CP/M + DOS) which also didn't start taking off until the early '80s. Not sure that Unix has any real claim to precedence here.