From: Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu>
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2023 16:02:20 -0400
To: TUHS main list <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Message-ID-Hash: SOVRIONVWRLNZYM4MEZYQSDVDV3QLZRO
Subject: [TUHS] Re: UNIX Influence on Teletype and Vice Versa
Archived-At: <https://www.tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/message/SOVRIONVWRLNZYM4MEZYQSDVDV3QLZRO/>

Joe Ossanna worked diligently to see that WECo's ASCII teletype really
would come to market and would meet the needs of Unix. He famously
estimated that Bell Labs alone was a sizable market: 777 machines. He
also leaned on WECo to make the return key issue a single newline. And
he specified what non-ascii characters would fill out the 128
positions on the Bell Labs type boxes. This requires encoding 7-bit
ASCII in 8 bits. I don't know whether WECo had been planning to do so
anyway.

Doug