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comment by lil
lil  ·  3595 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: IRC Post-Mortem: What Did You Learn?

:-)





user-inactivated  ·  3595 days ago  ·  link  ·  

At the risk of over-explaining the joke, a common misconfiguration on old dumb terminals would result in the ^W/^H not actually deleting the previous word/character, but rather inserting literal ^W/^H characters. The terminal itself would interpret them correctly, so it would appear to the user that they had deleted what they meant to delete. This had amusing results when people thought of a more tactful way to phrase something in an email.