Re: editor and word processor history (was: Re: RTF for emacs) (original) (raw)

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From: Barry Margolin
Subject: Re: editor and word processor history (was: Re: RTF for emacs)
Date: Thu, 29 May 2014 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 ***