9 votes

The day Return became Enter

1 comment

  1. creesch
    Link
    Just a deep dive in the history of the enter/return all the way back to the earliest typewriters.

    Just a deep dive in the history of the enter/return all the way back to the earliest typewriters.

    Typewriters, born in the 1870s, did not understand information, and didn’t care about the meaning of their output.

    Early models lacked 0 and 1 keys for cost cutting reasons. You were supposed to type a capital O or a lowercase l instead – they looked just about good enough. Teachers and tutorials encouraged you to overprint to create missing characters: type I on top of S to get a dollar sign, for example, or even reach for a pencil to fill in a missing part if overtyping wasn’t good enough.

    3 votes