On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, Rob Hudson wrote: > Anyone know the history of the various control characters? Like, why is > ctrl+z a 'z'? Does it mean zombie? Did ctrl+c come from cancel? > ctrl+d? Any others?
Someone once told me that CTRL-Z became suspend because CTRL-S was already used as a stop-flow interrupt. CTRL-Z in MS-DOS and CP/M marks the end of a file, though... :) I think the history you're looking for is actually the early history of DEC terminals. Mayhaps even the legendary green hulk(ing) VT-100. Terminal emulators in the *nix world seem largely derived from the well-understood VT control codes if termcap and terminfo are any evidence to what terminals have, at one point or another, been hooked up to a *nix server. In the pre-cretinous (mezzo-timeshare) period, back when VAX's were furtive little creatures just beginning to pop their heads into in the desolate wilderness of corporate accounting, there were quite a few different video terminal vendors. Some of them had some petty bizarre keybindings available to issue seemingly arbritrary signals to whatever computer they were supposed to be hooked up to. You might try Google's archive of alt.folklore.computers. also: http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/b/bucky_bits.html -po _______________________________________________ Eug-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
