This is my last comment on the CRLF issue, which I just used as the (for me) obvious example for what I was trying to say. On Jan 24, 2013, at 02:20, John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote: > Oh, my. This is getting to be interesting. I had no direct > interaction with or insight into the ASA (later ANSI) committee > that did ASCII You are off by about six decades. CR and LF were invented around 1901 by Donald Murray and became part of "International Telegraph Alphabet No. 2" (ITA2, now CCITT S.1), which was originally standardized in 1932. (That is the 5-bit code usually (incorrectly) called "Baudot code".) This was, of course, the state of the art from which the standardization of ASCII started six decades later. I think any further discussion of these details would be off-topic, but it does amuse me that the vestigial we are talking about is about 111 years old. Grüße, Carsten