[GreenKeys] Why have local reverse line feed and local backspace?

[Joe Duszyński]

All my ASCII units will do backspace......
What purpose you'd use it for on a Baudot/Murray machine would be
anyone's guess!

As for the Model 37... Mine will do backspace and reverse line feed
but not 1/2 line feeds.
If it could do a 1/2 line feed there are no "Small numbers" in the 96
characters of the character set on the unit.
There is full upper and lower case "Letters" and the usual ASCII
characters and numbers....
(See attached photo of typebox and the Machine for those that don't
know what a 37 even looks like! LOL!)
Anyway, You would have full size character super and subscripts and it
would look messy too.
H-Tab and V-Tab are standard and as Jim mentions is really worthless
as those functions can be handled with programming but hey they are
in ASCII specs...




On Tue, Dec 27, 2022 at 6:46 PM Jim Haynes <jhhaynes at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> That's always been a mystery to me too, and of course all the people who
> would know about it are dead now.  Most of them anyway.
>
> It kinda disgusts me to see those mod kits.  Somebody decided it was
> Really Important to have those features, which surely were not forseen in
> the original design.  So some engineer(s) had to figure out how to work
> around the parts that were already in there to put in these features and
> it was probably far from easy.  Then the tooling had to be made to produce
> the parts.  And I spoze by the time of Model 37 they had decided to plan
> ahead to put those feature in, which was easier than retrofit kits at
> least.
>
> Once you have the local backspace and reverse line feed I guess it's not
> that hard to have the stunt box convert those to online actions.  And
> there they might be useful.
>
> Especially in ASCII there was considered to be a need to backspace and
> type over characters that had already been printed to get some of the
> strange characters that are not in English.  Such as the squiggle over
> N in Spanish, and the slashed O in Nordic languages.  And this all became
> a mess with video terminals, because most of them use backspace in the
> sense of backspace-and-erase.  Early on some of them could not do that
> and you had to do backspace-space-backspace to erase a character.  Which
> a hard copy terminal could not do anyhow.  So all the hard thinking and
> arguing that the ASCII committees did was wasted on CRT terminals.
>
> Model 37 as I recall had forward and reverse half line feed, for the
> purpose of printing subscripts and superscripts.  No doubt something that
> Bell Labs said was needed, while all the rest of the world had to make do
> on computers with Model 33s.  Trying to do mathematical typesetting on a
> teleprinter is just beyond reasonable.
>
> Model 37 had online settable horizontal tabs.  I argued that was also
> a bad idea.  If you're going to use the machine connected to a computer
> you don't need to waste time with that mechanism, just have a character
> that jumps horizontally and let the computer figure out how many jumps
> and spaces are needed to get to the desired position.  And of course the
> computer stuff we were using at the time like BASIC assumed tabs were
> set 8 spaces apart and would be handled by spacing if the printer did
> not have horizontal tab.
>
> Pre-computer there were some ASR sets made for use with forms, where
> a control tape would position the type box to the next position on
> the form automatically.  Trying to do what was reasonable with a computer
> when you didn't have a computer.
>
>         ---
>
>         "Ya can argue all ya wanna, but it's dif'rent than it was."
>         "No it ain't! No it ain't!  But ya gotta know the territory."
>                 Meredith Willson, The Music Man
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