More importantly, what am I going to use to clean mirrors and windows?
I haven’t used a typewriter since I dicked around with one when I was little (born late 1989), but isn’t the key, even on a typewriter, a new line (blank vertical space) AND carriage return? I was under the impression that a carriage return referred to returning to printhead to wherever the default position is (usually to the left-hand horizontal page margin in English writing), whereas the key itself did more than JUST carriage return*, and in fact that combination newline/carriage return keys on typewriters were a relatively new feature (old typewriters just adding a vertical space and you had to carriage return by physically pushing the carriage to the left with your hand).
I defer to you experience, either way, I’m just curious – it seems odd to call it the carriage return key if it performs more functions in one keystroke than just returning the carriage.
- Which is, in fact, the reason for the infuriating difference between Windows newlines being
while Unix and Unix-likes have just
, apparently considering the necessity of simulating a carriage return silly.
I find it very easy to find and buy paper maps; I update my Hagstrom’s every few years.
Obsolete? Hardly.
That’s okay, though, because the only people who call it that are people’s dads, and they’ll be all dead soon enough. 
I was rereading “Neuromancer” a few years ago and was amused that in a book about the changes wrought on human culture by technology, the first line has had its meaning completely reversed by a minor technological innovation.
“The sky was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” meant the sky was grey and stormy when the book was written in the 80’s, but now almost every TV turns a pleasant sky blue when its turned to a dead channel.
There was a lever to pull for a new line. The carriage return, returned the “carriage” that held the paper back to the “start” position.
It will pretty futile telling a robot to “Burn rubber”. They will be programmed to obey the speed limits. For that matter, what will cities do for revenue when none of the robot drivers are speeding.
MISunderstand it, more likely. When the TV was first called “The Boob Tube”, “boob” meant “idiot”*, not “piece of female anatomy”.
As evidenced by its frequent appearances in opo literature – magazines, newspapers, books – inevitably to describe an idiot. “Boob” as “breast” may have a longer histotry behind it, but it became a popular and recognized sorta euphemism for “breast” only since about the late 1960s. Before that you could use the word and not hsave anyone think you were being pririent.
Consequence already probably in place: You kids today don’t get the funny in this, one of my favorite songs ever.
I’m imagining the sky is pitch black, except for a large grey rectangle, with the words ‘NO SIGNAL’ inside it. Much more ominous.
You won’t pay gas taxes because fuel efficient vehicles reduce the amount of revenue for the govt. Instead, you’ll be paying a tax per mile driven. this will be calculated by mandatory GPS units on cars. FLA is already considering this technology. The side effect is that the govt will be able to track your vehicle and look up it’s travel history.
making your mark will be the only handwriting people know.
On the typewriter I learned on, the carriage return was a lever that both scrolled the paper up and returned the carriage, aligning the left margin of the paper with the stationary key strike zone. It’s on the left side of the carriage in this picture.
But if papers are gone, where will future kidnappers get the letters to cut up for their ransom notes?
[humorless pedant]
Magazines were generally used for that purpose, not newspapers. At any rate, it is more common nowadays to send text messages.
[/humorless pedant]
What kids? A lot of the people I train in using computers are older than me (I’m in my mid-40s) and have no idea what that pic is supposed to be. Just last week, a coworker in his mid-20s helped me explain to a bunch of guys in their 50s and, after the class, told me “I’m suddenly feeling sooooo old.”
It was actually the ASCII code 0x0D, which shows up as <CR> on the character tables, standing for carriage return. It is what a terminal or terminal emulator usually sends when you hit the enter key, though some translate the single keystroke into <CR> + <LF>. (LF= line feed) In this case it is/was what tells you you hit the end of a line of a .CSV file, which is what his program needed to parsing for.
But my point was that this person had never seen a manual typewriter with an actual carriage that you had to manually sling at the end of each line, and had no idea what CR stood for, and no idea why “enter” might be associated with the word for a vehicle pulled by a horse.
Is that a UK thing? I don’t get the funny in that now, and I’ve been around for…quite a while.
There’s a mash of UK landline telephone tones underpinning the song.