[TUHS] Early Unix and Keyboard Skills

Ronald Natalie ron at ronnatalie.com
Thu Nov 3 11:47:19 AEST 2022


I’m not sure the model 33 required a carriage return delay.   At 110 
baud it had plenty of time to move the carriage. back.
Other printers (especially faster ones) weren’t so lucky, but the LA36 
decwriter had a catchup mode to print the backlog after a return.
The LA120 was boustrophedonic so returns weren’t as much of an issue.

------ Original Message ------
>From "John P. Linderman" <jpl.jpl at gmail.com>
To jason-tuhs at shalott.net
Cc "steve jenkin" <sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au>; "TUHS" <tuhs at tuhs.org>
Date 11/2/2022 12:20:12 PM
Subject [TUHS] Re: Early Unix and Keyboard Skills

>
>
>On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 3:02 PM <jason-tuhs at shalott.net> wrote:
>>
>> > I’ve never heard anyone mention keyboard skills with the people of 
>>the
>> > CSRC - doesn’t anyone know?
>>
>>
>>https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/AUUGN/AUUGN-V05.4.pdf (p23)
>>
>> > History tells us that the guys who designed [UNIX] did their own 
>>typing
>> > into the machine.  It seems to me that because of this, the main 
>>reason
>> > that UNIX enjoys/suffers from terse input and output is not through 
>>any
>> > intellectual design decisions made at some early stage but because 
>>the
>> > UNIX designers were just bad typists working on slow peripherals.
>>
>>
>>   -Jason
>
>Mostly rampant speculation on my part, but with 110 baud modems, 10 
>characters per second right?,
>and added delays for carriage returns, it was the peripherals that 
>encouraged brevity. Code would be
>viewed multiple times, but entered roughly once.
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