Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

> How many spaces is a tab? GCC seems to say “8”, for some reason

On old mechanical typewriters without adjustable tab stops (which were on the carriage, not the part you typed BTW, which skeuomorphically survived in Word’s tab stop interface), the tab key (those that had tab keys) slid the carriage left 8 spaces. You could often push it back a bit if you wanted. This carried over to TTYs which were grossly electromechanical devices and from there to glass teletypes and terminals.

So it’s the proper default.

Typewriters were pretty direct. Often they omitted the 1 and 0 digits (just use l and O). Of course there was not a VT or LF — you just stretched out your right hand and turned the platen. For FF you gripped the paper and pulled. On some models, to backspace you just pushed the carriage. And to delete (called rubout on a some old terminals) you painted or XXXed out the offending text — or used a pen. Even on legal documents (which is why they still both write out use digits to specify numbers)

I recollect a typing class (which did exist) where we were admonished never to just grip the paper and yank, but to pull the release lever and ease the sheet out. But people never did that in the movies, so it was a hard sell.

Which is to say there were movies where writers worked typewriters, generally just yanking a sheet, balling it up, and throwing it toward a wastebasket, and missing. Actual writing was too boring, even then, to film.

I wonder how many HN readers have no direct experience with a typewriter? Probably quite a few. This is a good description.

At least some (Royals I think) there was a lever on the right that you would operate for CR (carriage return) and line feed. Pull a little bit to the left, and it would feed a single line, pull the remainder, and it would return the carriage, so you could just do a couple of short pulls and advance a couple of lines more precisely than yanking the paper.

Yanking was just to get the whole sheet out so you could ball it up and hurl it. The Carriage Return lever was there from earliest times.

It was decades later that they got a RETURN key (what they call Enter nowadays) that would do the LF/CR for you. Eventually there was a tape with white ink so when you backspaced, you could white out what you had mis-typed by mistyping it again! Before that, you would overtype a "/" and bull ahead. Or stop and (literally!) paint it over with a little brush.

The inventor of the little brush and the fast-drying paint became one of the first female business tycoons. (There were tycoons then, too. And impresarios. Dunno what happened to those.)

> The inventor of the little brush and the fast-drying paint became one of the first female business tycoons.

Bette Nesmith Graham indeed became a (minor) tycoon from Liquid Paper but died in her 50s.

Her son Michael was a member of the Monkees and Bette Nesmith Graham, produced Repo-man. I've met him; he's a nice guy.

I’m 32 years old and have never used a typewriter in my life. So I’d imagine the majority of HN users haven’t either.

On the other hand, HN is full of people who a) type all day for a living and b) enjoy tech history and quirky things.

I'm 31 and have used at least 2 typewriters in my life - obviously at no point did I need to for either school or work, but there's something romantic about them and I often fantasise about getting one to write with... though I'm fairly sure it would end up gathering dust as a (possibly pretentious-seeming) ornament in the corner of the room, so I avoid the impulse to buy one.

You could just keep a nice portable one in its case and bring it out for special occasions.

Just the idea of a portable. Almost but not quite like a portable piano in my mind.

That would cover the "pretentious seeming" aspect, but my main reason is that I already have too many things like that which I don't really need, and I don't live in a huge mansion to keep accruing random stuff like that!

Re the romance: enjoy [https://www.filfre.net/2021/10/i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-sc...]

This is also where Windows CRLF for a new line comes from.

CR is Carriage Return, which on a typewriter you could do by moving the carriage back to the start of the line. Often there was a lever for this.

LF is Line Feed, accomplished by turning the platen. The horizontal position on the page stayed the same, just one line down vertically.

Having these separate made it possible to easily fill in tabular data and printed forms of various sorts. It also made it possible to type some (rather messy) accented characters by using CR and hitting space until you reached the character to accent, then typing an appropriate punctuation mark. A number of modern Compose Key sequences follow the same patterns, eg o" for ö.

Later typewriters added ways to do this automatically; eg the IBM Selectric had a "RETURN" key. This both returned the carriage to the start of the line and fed down one line. It was still possible to perform either action separately to fill in tables and other forms.

Windows did it because DOS did it, and DOS did it because almost everybody else did. IIRC Multics was the first to have just a newline character (^j) and Unix adopted it, along with case sensitivity etc etc. The Mac was the only system I ever saw to use ^M as newline.

Multics is also why @ is erase line and # erase character in the Unix tty driver. Oho, you’ve never seen that? It’s because disabling that became the default in the early 90s or perhaps even late 80s, but I’m pretty sure it’s still there. Probably made it into POSIX for back compatibility with some gereatric system.

^M for new line on the Mac was a holdover from the Apple ][, so you can blame Woz for that one. I don’t know about other contemporaneous 8-bit systems like Commodore or Tandy

I hate to say it, but Windows has the line breaks right. Why did Unix see fit to just type further and further to the right on a never ending paper?

If you want to get a newline without moving all the way to the left, you can use the vertical tab character.

No reason to complicate line endings for a rare circumstance like this.

That's not the Unix way. The Unix way is to compose crappy, half-assed solutions like CRLF from parts, rather than create dedicated solutions like VT.

Do one thing and do it well! There's no reason a line feed should also need to return the carriage. What is this, systemd-lf? What if I want to swap the carriage return implementation for the BSD one?

> Later typewriters added ways to do this automatically

All in at least the last 70 years did (I had a Remington that would be at least 70 years old now). There is a lever on manual typewriters on the right-hand side that you yank leftwards that does a CR and then a LF (or vice-versa, can't remember).

Edit: Thinking about it, the Remington would be about 90 years old now - it was ancient when I got it, and I'm quite ancient now. And mechanically, it must have been LF first.

Yep, and often that lever had two positions, so you yank it partway for a LF, and the rest of the way for a CR.

But the really early manual typewriters didn't have this. Typewriters are old, the first commercial one was invented in 1865 and manufactured in 1870, and the first commercially successful typewriter was manufactured in 1874. Neither had such a lever.

Also, some typewriters did not have !: you had to type ' BACKSPACE .

Vaguely related to people typing O for 0 and l for 1: UK number plates do not distinguish between 0 and O and between 1 and I so software that handles registration numbers must take account of that.

Also typewriters had a thing called 'pitch', which refers to the number of characters per horizontal inch. There were 10-pitch and 12-pitch typewriters, although both had the same height, 6 lines per inch vertically.

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