what's the difference between LFLine Fee and NL New line 4452

Dennis Ritchie

I am not aware of any operating system that *doesn't* allow the user to end a line of input by pressing just one key on a terminal.

In fact, this option existed even on early 5-level machines, such as the Model 19, as is noted in many radio amateur publications.

(In helping to bring Unix to the world, you are of course a great benefactor of humanity; do not feel I am denying this simply because I am giving someone a hard time for, apparently, being a little of a Unix bigot.)

Generally speaking, though, as far as I am aware, it is not customary to take advantage of such a setting on ASCII terminals connected to computers, even when they're running Unix. There is no need to do so. It merely makes it impossible for the computer to do things like printing a large expanse of underscored text - unless the terminal has a backspace function, in which case unnecessary wear and tear is still involved.

I take issue with the options chosen for Unix in two areas.

One is simply that Unix is in the minority, apparently. Most ASCII terminals seem to be designed on the premise that the key generating CR is the one to be placed where the carriage return key on an electric typewriter would be placed - and thus, it is expected to be the one that the host operating system accepts as indicating end-of-record from terminals.

The other is the use of any character as a record delimiter *internally on the computer*. Characters don't delimit records! One punched card is a record. An inter-block gap delimits a record. And on disk, or on blocked tapes, you can always precede a record with an indication of how long it is - like a Pascal string, rather than a C string.

Unfortunately, as I've noted, the reason most of the *other* microcomputer operating systems (i.e., CP-M, MS-DOS) weren't written by mainframe bigots like myself is that there weren't enough of us. JCL made an IBM mainframe a hard beastie to love - very few people had the good fortune that I did, in being exposed to an IBM mainframe through the medium of MTS, the Michigan Terminal System... which let its true soft, cuddly nature shine through.

John Savard