an odd question

From: Master of all that Sucks <vance_at_ikickass.org>
Date: Thu Aug 9 09:56:16 2001

Well, MS-DOS 1.0 was doing it long before WordStar.

Peace... Sridhar

On Thu, 9 Aug 2001, Jeff Hellige wrote:

> on 8/9/01 9:47 AM, Dan Wright at dtwright_at_uiuc.edu wrote:
> > not sure if this is exactly on-topic, but I figure if anyone would know, it
> > would be this bunch... where did the convention of using "^x" to represent
> > "Ctrl-x" come from? I wonder because you see that convention everywhere, but
> > it's totally non-intuitave -- i.e. why does the carat symbol mean "hold
> > control
> > while pressing the following key"? I think this came up because someone
> > pointed out that using pine the first time was really hard until they figured
> > out what "^" meant. so, anyone know where that convention came from?
>
> I believe Wordstar used to display the control sequences for cut and
> pasting and other block move type commands in that format in it's menus.
> I'm almost positive that versions of Worstar I was using on XT-clones in the
> mid-80's were like that. At the time, quite a large number of text editors,
> including those included with programs such as TurboBasic, used the Wordstar
> commands and conventions as well.
>
> Jeff
>
Received on Thu Aug 09 2001 - 09:56:16 BST