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My first computer experience: in the late '70s I built a 6502-based micro from a kit (Tangerine Ltd, in the UK) but couldn't get it to run, so the kit makers had me visit to check it out and gave me a working version to use in their office. The manual said something like "Start BASIC by typing 'BASIC<CR>' on the keyboard". An hour or so later when they'd found & fixed my build bug and returned my micro, I still hadn't figured out that '<CR>' meant I should hit the Enter key.

Nevertheless that kit started me on a 40 year programming career bringing me and my family to California.




Inverse experience: I had to realize that "Enter" meant the carriage return key ;)


When you start with a 5-level Baudot machine as your 'terminal' -- it's pretty easy to remember that the Carriage Return key causes the, ahh, Carriage to Return, ready to over-print (if you don't do a Line Feed); or if you did a Line Feed, then you're at the beginning of a fresh, new line.

Unix using \n for carriage return + line feed was ok only because it was still possible to use \r (carriage return) to do overprinting.

And of course, the 5-level baudot machine had no lower case; but unix could output \L\O\W\E\R \C\A\S\E just fine...

And then, don't forget about trigraphs: '??(' == '[' and '??)' == ']' etc

Ahh, the joy of legacy hardware.


Plain old typewriters made CR and LF pretty self evident, too.




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