From the earlier history of the Internet... sort of (Week 2)

 Teletype® - or a teleprinter, or a teletypewriter was a device first developed in the 19 century to replace the telegraph. The use of a telegraph was problematic and cumbersome, as it required operators to be trained in the use of Morse code. These machines would be operated with a keyboard like typewriters, sending signals by copper wires across vast distances to be printed out as human-readable text on the other end.




The word "teletype" comes from the name of the Teletype Corporation, a company that specialized in teletypewriters. The company was in business until 1974's antitrust lawsuit against its parent company - AT&T.

 One of the things of note in teleprinters were control characters (or "format effectors") - characters that did not (and do not) represent written symbols, but are used to control how written symbols are placed.

NUL and DEL were introduced in the Baudot code in 1870, and the modified Murray code of 1901 also added CR and LF. Interesting to note: NUL was intended as a character to be ignored by printers, it was introduced because of mechanical constraints of teletypewriters, but nowadays it is commonly used by programming languages to denote the end of a string.

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