Historical question: LF vs. CR\LF in text files

[Isaac Rabinovitch]

tomr at ashtate (Tom Rombouts) writes:

>Forgive the bandwidth, but seeing that others beside myself are
>having occassional problems relating to the differences between
>UNIX vs. DOS (and CP/M, correct?) in handling end of lines, I am
>wondering how this started.  Since UNIX came first, I am going to
>guess that at some time, somewhere someone said "Hey - let's add
>a carriage return!"  Does anyone know the (possibly amusing?) story
>behind this?  What was the essential rationale?

Unix came before micro OSs, but the CR/LF convention is older than
Unix -- in fact it's older than computers, having been used on
electromechanical teletypes.

The developers of Unix didn't merely drop the carriage return character.
They renamed the line feed character "newline".  At the time some people
objected to this, pointing out that there was now no "down one line"
character.

Note that initially CP/M (and MS-DOS, which started out as a CP/M clone)
imitated pre-Unix mini OSs.  MS-DOS didn't start adding Unix-like features
until later.