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Re: editor and word processor history (was: Re: RTF for emacs)
From:
Barry Margolin
Subject:
Re: editor and word processor history (was: Re: RTF for emacs)
Date:
2014年5月29日 19:49:35 -0400
User-agent:
MT-NewsWatcher/3.5.3b3 (Intel Mac OS X)
In article <87k394mbwd.fsf@debian.uxu>,
Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> wrote:
> Robert Thorpe <rt@robertthorpeconsulting.com> writes:
>
> > In those days programs were punched onto cards using
> > keypunches or punched onto paper tape. Sometimes
> > they were written on paper and someone else would
> > punch them in. In those early days editors were
> > there to help people fix mistakes afterwards once a
> > file existed on a tape or disk. Only later were they
> > used for the whole writing process.
>
> OK, but then how did the data get on the tape/disk in
> the first place?
IIRC, Teletypes could be put into local mode, where what you typed was
punched directly onto the paper tape.
For punch cards, there were key punches -- they were essentially
typewriters that punched onto cards instead of writing onto paper.
The ASCII code for DEL is 127 because that was all the bits on a
7-column paper tape. So if you made a mistake while punching the tape,
you could back up and press DEL, and it would punch all the holes in
that row -- it was the paper-tape equivalent of White-Out. Applications
that read text from paper tape would ignore that code.
--
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***