The Birth of Standard Error (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The Birth of Standard Error (2013)

spinellis.gr

81 pointsnazri112 comments

See also http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/ for further information about early work (reverse engineering!) at Bell Labs on typesetting machines, and http://haagens.com/oldtype.tpl.html for general phototypesetting history, featuring gems like: There was a romantic tradition, in [the US] at least, of the drifter Typesetters, who were good enough at the craft to find work wherever they traveled. They'd work in one town until they wanted a change and then drift on. They had a reputation for being well read, occasionally hard drinking, strong union men who enjoyed an independence particularly rare in the 19th century.[0]

It's amazing how interlinked typesetting and computing are. Here we have a troff link, then there's the PDF (from postscript) and TeX world, keyboard layouts, telegrams, rotating drums and early mechanical cryptography, etc.

If anyone's interested in good collections on the history of printing, I can recommend both the Museum of Printing and Graphic Communication (Musée de l’imprimerie et de la communication graphique) in Lyon, France[1] and the National Technical Museum (Národní technické muzeum) in Prague, Czech Republic,[2] which also sports the best permanent exhibition on the history of photography I have ever seen (by a long shot). For those of you in California, there's also the International Printing Museum[3] in Carson (open 10-4PM Saturdays).

[0] Added to 'Hackers of History' section of my fortune clone @ https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

[1] http://www.imprimerie.lyon.fr/imprimerie/

[2] http://www.ntm.cz/en

[3] http://www.printmuseum.org/

Mark Twain was a suppose the best known author to have been employed as a typographer. For that matter, one of the vagabonds in Huckleberry Finn, I forget whether Duke or Dauphin, evidently knows his way around the type case and the press.

The Monotype System must have been one of the earliest uses of paper tape for encoding information--see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotype_System .

Unix stderr not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_error

I wasn't aware that Microsoft Windows supported a stderr filehandle separate from stdout. When I worked a little on it about 17 years ago, I thought it didn't have that (e.g. warnings from Perl were intermixed with redirected stdout or so). Did I misinterpret something or has the system been changed?

(Edit: that was longer ago than I first remembered; it was on Windows NT.)

Yeah, Windows NT Workstation 3.1 was the first Windows to have stderr redirection[1]. Windows 95, 98 and Millennium (oh, that horrid edition. I actually bought it! Gag.) don't support redirecting STDERR according to Wiki[2].

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/110930

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMMAND.COM#Redirection.2C_pip...

Thanks. Thus it seems that I misinterpreted it (I was on NT 4): I've got somewhat solid confirmation that Perl also supported it on NT, thus I guess I got to the conclusion from old docs that were written for Win95/98/ME.

You can redirect stderr on Windows (nowadays) -- it's mentioned in your first link. Example:

my.exe 2> err.txt

Yes -- I was just indicating that WinNT was the first Windows to do it. Every Windows based on the NT kernel supports stderr redirection. Win95, 98, and ME didn't, since they were on a different kernel.

Still can't believe I bought ME. sigh

But, where did you read standard error during the teletype era? Was it printed to a separate tape?

On the PDP-11, I'd presume, via video terminal or some kind of typewritten (non-photoset) output? The standard out went to the typesetter then, is my reading of it.

On a PDP-11, some sort of line printer. Video terminals weren't common as console devices in those days.

As I recall, same as today...went to stdout unless you told it otherwise. You'd often send it to the 'console' device, which at the time was something like an AR-33 or LA-180 line printer.

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