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Comment by Starwatcher2001 | Hacker News Reader

Starwatcher2001·

Still have mine in the loft somewhere, that and the ribbon cable to attach it to my TRS-80. Being able to print out program listings and annotate them revolutionised debugging for me.

The "O" character and "0" number looked very similar, so we used to use a hack to print "0", followed by a backspace escape code, and then a slash. That produced a slashed zero.

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> so we used to use a hack to print "0", followed by a backspace escape code, and then a slash. That produced a slashed zero.

That's awesome. Thanks for sharing, because as somebody who grow up with windows 3.1 being the earliest OS, these stories are great.

This sort of thing is actually exactly what backspace was originally for - it predates computers, and was used on typewriters to e.g. make accented characters, or underline text (ASCII has underscore as a symbol for that exact purpose). You could also make things bold by doing backspace and then re-printing the same character, one or more times.

Right, and that usage was later carried on to Unix man pages. Hence this tiny but handy script I wrote (and have used for years), to strip those formatting characters:

m, a Unix shell utility to save cleaned-up man pages as text:

https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2017/03/m-unix-shell-utility-to-...

That cable was apparently not universal for a while. I needed to make a cable for the Apple II parallel port to an MX-80. I forget why now, but it needed DB25 on one end and maybe a Molex header on the other.

I first had an Okidata. (Someone else's selection. I later picked up a used MX-80 -- or FX-80; I forget at the moment and don't feel like going to the basement cupboard to check.)

It, too, could backspace. Mushing together characters got me umlauted vowels and Eszett.

I never knew about this trick. Very cool, thanks for sharing!

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