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The Birth of Standard Error (2013)
lier today Stephen Johnson, in a mailing list run by the The Unix Heritage Society, described the birth of the standard error concept: the idea that a program's error output is sent on a channel different from that of its normal output. Over the past forty years, all major operating systems and language libraries have embraced this concept.
This, washing-machine sized, equipment would typeset documents by flashing a strobe to expose character glyphs that were pre-installed on a rotating drum. The text input normally came from a paper tape, and the output was rendered onto film, which then required a cumbersome, dirty, and smelly development process. You'd needed to regularly take the developer roller and gear guts into the janitor's closet and scrub it with a toothbrush in the slop sink under running water."
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