Uninteresting depends on your perspective. For anyone old enough to have used a Teletype certainly it is no mystery, but how many of us are left?

Speaking of, a Teletype didn't understand anything outside of the ASCII range. So what was reverse line feed good for? Absolutely nothing!

The author remarks that his Teletype was old because it didn't have lower case. But in my experience that was almost universal - I think I only saw a single Teletype that had lower case.

Olivetti Teletype had lower case. I had an interesting episode, where the University of Nitpicking Nazis discussed if my thesis, printed entirely on Teletype, was acceptable. -- It was not as good-looking as with IBM Selectric, but quite comparable to regular manual typewriters.

Was it the letterforms that bothered them, or the curled yellow paper?

I really dont know, I think it was a moral issue. When the paper was made by a computer, it was like cheating. I would have been cheap and easy to hire a professional typist to make a copy, but it would have been so lame, that I refused to do it.

Few years later those same professors got their own computer terminals and then they demanded personal computer operators. Masters of Academia do not dirty their hands on keyboards.

Someone needs to introduce them to Donald Knuth.

VERTICAL TAB is much more puzzling.

Devices that needed to produce output on printed forms would use a physical reference to ensure the text went to the right place. One of the commands a tabulator could give the typewriter it drove was to move the form to the next marked position—a literal tab, or maybe a functional equivalent like a hope in a punched tape. Thus, vertical tab.

interesting, hadn't heard of it before. Apparently it was primarily for printing purposes

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3380538/what-is-a-vertic...

Until you insert a floppy written in DOS into a Unix machine.