Control Characters
A typewriter or electromechanical printer can print characters on paper, and execute operations such as move the carriage back to the left margin of the same line (carriage return), advance to the same column of the next line (line feed), and so on. Commands to control non-printing operations were transmitted in exactly the same way as printable characters by sending control characters with defined functions (e.g., the line feed character forced the carriage to move to the same position on the next line) to teleprinters. In modern computing and communications a few control characters, such as carriage return and line feed, have retained their original functions (although they are often implemented in software rather than activating electromechanical mechanisms to move a physical printer carriage) but many others are no longer required and are used for other purposes.
Read more about this topic: Teleprinter, Teleprinter Operation
Famous quotes containing the words control and/or characters:
“I don’t think I was constructed to be monogamous. I don’t think it’s the nature of any man to be monogamous.... Men are propelled by genetically ordained impulses over which they have no control to distribute their seed into as many females as possible.”
—Marlon Brando (b. 1924)
“No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life—the first twenty years of it—had about them something semi-fictitious.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)