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From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Is GForth KEY really ANS Forth standard?
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2017 13:48:52 -0800
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anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) writes:
> Supposedly the VT220 produced DEL from the <x| key (which is in the
> position where the Backspace key is on a modern PC keyboard).  The
> Linux console produced DEL for the Backspace key for this reason,

Historically DEC OS's used DEL to erase the previous character, while
early Unix used DEL as an interrupt character (DEC used control-C).
Unix originally used # (pound sign) to erase the previous character, I'm
not kidding.  Maybe that made sense on printing terminals.  My guess is
that people thought that was weird so they expected backspace to erase.