In message <rmi3bua63vl.fsf@fnord.ir.bbn.com>, Greg Troxel writes:
>Andy Ball <andy.ball@earthlink.net> writes:
>
>>    JB> Yes. And that key is expected to delete to the *left*
>>      > of the cursor. :-)
>> 
>> Not by me, but then I imagine it depends on the application.
>
>Back in Seventh Edition (late 70s), and maybe during part of Sixth
>(earlier was # I think, for printing terminals), the standard erase
>character was \0177, and everyone who used Unix expected it to delete
>left.  Specifically, in other than raw mode, people expected the
>computer to send BS SPACE BS and to remove the last recent character
>from the input buffer.
>
>I only became aware a Delete that deletes to the right much later,
>with window systems, and perhaps not until PCs started doing that.   I
>don't remember delete-to-right during the X10 days.


In 6th Edition, erase was # and kill was @.  In those days, the C
preprocessor wasn't used very much -- it wasn't even invoked unless the 
first character of the file was a # -- so you didn't need that key 
much.  And since there was no inter-host email, @ was even less needed.

That style was still the default in 7th Edition as it came from Bell 
Labs; I think it was Berkeley who switched the default.

		--Prof. Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb