Re:Emulation of Unix V6 on a PDP-11 with an emulated teletype
by twknotes on Sunday March 08, 2020 @05:32AM
(#22517170)
backspace not invented yet? How can you write a program with this thing!
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Re:Emulation of Unix V6 on a PDP-11 with an emulated teletype
by kps on Sunday March 08, 2020 @11:52AM
(#22518636)
Backspace had been invented; the problem is that on a printing terminal you end up with an illegible mess. So early Unix defaulted to erase '#' kill '@'. You can still see artifacts of that choice — ‘#’ being popular for things that start a line, like comments and C preprocessor commands, and ‘@’ being the only ASCII punctuation with no function in any common Unix tool.