Re: Trailing "m"s at the end of every line when viewing man pages
On 20150405_0201-0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
> Stephen Powell wrote:
> > I am experiencing a very strange phenomenon. I have an old IBM 3151
> > ASCII display terminal that has been lying around the house;
> > and today I decided to see if I could get it connected up to one
>
> Fun! I never used one of those models and am unfamiliar with it in
Yes!
> particular.
>
-- snip --
>
> Then at least you would know it is the CR that isn't handled like in a
> standard terminal.
^^^^^^^^
Times change. If one waits even a short while, they can change a lot.
When this terminal was new, a 'standard' terminal was a mechanical
teletype manufactured by Teletype Corp. in Skokie, IL. The generic
name for this 'terminal' was, I think, a 'glass teletype' Each
computer company had its own special glass teletypes that interfaced
to its computer. All proprietary.
None of the glass teletypes had the very useful scroll back feature
of the real teletype that they were trying to emulate. Teletype
paper came in rolls. A single roll was a many meters long. It would
pile up behind the teletype as one worked. It could always be pulled
out and reviewed back to initial login at the beginning of the
session. Some people left the paper behind for someone else to clear
away. Others saved it, rolled up and labeled at their desks.
It took 0.1 sec. to mechanically process one character, except for
carriage return. That took up to 0.2 sec. The placement of the
carriage return character before the non-printing line feed
character allowed the carriage to get all the back to the left before
a printing character arrived. It was in the design of teletype that
this cr/lf feature was baked into our history.
Cheers,
--
Paul E Condon
pecondon@mesanetworks.net
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