Re: [ietf-smtp] Stray <LF> in the middle of messages

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

In article <[e-mail]> you write:
>CR takes you back to the start of the current line, and LF takes you to 
>the next line (at the current position), ...

Except when it doesn't. In 1969 when people at Bell Labs were writing
the early versions of Unix, they had a lot of the otherwise obscure
Model 37 Teletype, which had upper and lower case and where the 012
character was a new line (NL), moving the print position to the
beginning of the next line. It had unusually sophisticated buffering
for the era and didn't need any delay characters. Teletype was an
AT&T subsidiary so it's not surprising that the Labs would get early
versions of their products.

Other places the models 33 and 35 were the most popular terminals,
both of which needed CR/LF to print properly. But as Dave noted, we
had to pick some line end convention and given how common CR/LF was at
the time, it was as good a convention as any.

Even the earliest Unix systems had tty drivers that could adapt to
model 33 or 35, adding CR in front of NL and providing escapes to
enter lower case letters and other characters not on the keyboard.