On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 1:48 PM, Jim Adcock <jimad@msn.com> wrote:
Third, the war between newline meaning "newline means line break within sentence" vs. "newline means break between paragraphs" was fought in the early 1970's with the near-universal adoption of the rule "newline means break between paragraphs" being adopted "everywhere" in the personal computer world.
I don't know what planet you're from, but it's not mine. The best selling single personal computer model of time, the Commodore 64, started selling in 1982, and I'm pretty sure it didn't do word wrapping. Most programs on MS-DOS didn't do word wrapping. Still today, Notepad on Windows makes word-wrap optional, so it's clearly not universal. On my Unix system today, most programs don't do word wrapping; even on Firefox I sometimes open a text over the web and find that I can't read it because the lines aren't word-wrapped. Seriously, early 1970s? Wikipedia lists the Commodore PET as the first successfully mass-marketed computer, and that was in 1977. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.