Telegrams and teleprinters
- Eliot Muir
The next evolution of character encoding after morse code would be things like Baudot code which was invented by Emile Baudot in the 1870’s.
The was encoding in 5 bits and sent over a telegraph wire or radio signal. The rate of information transfer was measured in baud which is a term we still use today to measure the rate of data transfer for a modem.
Baudot’s system was adapted and improved upon by Donald Murray.
These systems introduced the idea of control characters like:
Carriage return (CR) (In ASCII and Unicode today this is defined by the value 13 (0x0D in hexadecimal) or \r in C.
This would return the print end to the left most column of the printer.
Line feed (LF) (In ASCII and Unicode today this is defined by the value 10 (0x0A in hexadecimal) or \n in C and other C like languages.
This would rotate the paper up one line.
This distinction has echoed through computing ever since.
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