I too have spent time writing code to deblock files with various delimite rs. Darn waste of time! Some hardware devices LF just moved the platen up one, while CR moved the head back to the left margin. I don't know why Unix used NL (==LF) instead. Perhaps a different har dware device? I'm even less clear where the Mac got CR in 1984.
But I still think ASCII should have specified the typographic effect of t he control characters. (Unicode does.) I didn't have Pipelines, or a PC, or a Mac, back when I started writing c ode to deal with this. It was just Unix LF versus the Internet standard(?) CRLF. Alan Ackerman Alan (dot) Ackerman (at) Bank of America (dot) com
