In the pre-computer era, typewriters were equipped with a lever on the left side known as a carriage return. When pressed, the mechanism sent the paper roll, or carriage, to the right and at the same time flipped the paper up to start a new line. Eventually, an energy return was created and pressed with the little finger of the right hand. Smith Corona first added this feature to electric typewriters in 1960.
In the past, typewriters relied on carriage returns to advance pages.
The carriage return, or just “return” for short, is now known as the Enter key and is labeled with a back arrow symbol (↵). This key has the same function as the original toggle, moving the cursor to the beginning of the next line. However, with the advent of the line break, it was no longer necessary to press Enter at the end of each line. The Enter/Return key is now known as a hard return and is only used at the end of a paragraph.
The “enter” key on a computer performs the same function as a carriage return.
Carriage return also refers to the symbol, command, or key that causes the printer to position itself or the cursor to appear in the left margin. It also controls the paper feed. In ASCII or Unicode, the decimal character code 13 represents it. In some programming languages like C, UNIX, Java and others, it is represented by r.
Due to variations in operating languages and the code they use, text files are not always compatible between operating systems. For example, the Macintosh uses CR code to indicate the end of each line, similar to a typewriter. With Linux, each line ends with LF, which indicates line break. These codes don’t just differ in letters; their ASCII codes are also different: CR is 13 in ASCII code, and LR is 10. With Microsoft products, the lines end with a combination of both: CRLF.
Fortunately, most people can use the FTP (File Transfer Protocol) protocol to transfer text files from one operating system to another. To transfer text files, users must choose the ASCII mode of FTP. To transfer other types of files such as photos or sound files, you must use FTP in binary mode.
