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Subject: Re: Laser Printers
To: wollman@lcs.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman)
Date: Wed, 3 Apr 96 8:22:03 MET DST
From: Greg Lehey <lehey.pad@sni.de>
Cc: lehey.pad@sni.de, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <9604021602.AA04623@halloran-eldar.lcs.mit.edu>; from "Garrett Wollman" at Apr 2, 96 11:02 am
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> <<On Tue, 2 Apr 96 8:29:24 MET DST, Greg Lehey <lehey.pad@sni.de> said:
>
>> To be fair to HP, this applies to all printers I know.  The original
>> definitions of CR and LF are:
>
>> Carriage return: return the carriage (print head) to the left margin.
>
>> Line feed: rotate the platen one line forward without moving the
>> carriage.
>
>> UNIX abused LF to mean both functions, which saves space, but is still
>> not correct.
>
> BZZZZT!  Wrong, but thanks for playing.
>
> The alternative use of code 10 as NL (`newline') rather than LF
> (`linefeed') was in ANSI X3.64-1968, and is still there today.

I stand (partially) corrected.  It obviously wasn't UNIX.  However,
assigning two different meanings to the same character must have come
as the the result of a de facto usage rather than a planned change to
the function.  Was it Multics, perhaps?

Greg