alt Hacker NewsRemember that back in the mists of time, computers used typewriter-esque machines for user interaction and text output. You had to send a CR followed by an LF to go to the next line on the physical device. Storing both characters in the file meant the OS didn't need to insert any additional characters when printing. Having two separate characters let you do tricks like overstriking (just send CR, no LF)
True, but I don’t think there was a common reason to ever send a linefeed without going back to the beginning. Were people printing lots of vertical pipe characters at column 70 or something?
It would’ve been far less messy to make printers process linefeed like \n acts today, and omit the redundant CR. Then you could still use CR for those overstrike purposes but have a 1-byte universal newline character, which we almost finally have today now that Windows mostly stopped resisting the inevitable.