
The Birth of Standard Error (2013) - nazri1
http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20131211/index.html
======
contingencies
See also
[http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/)
for further information about early work (reverse engineering!) at Bell Labs
on typesetting machines, and
[http://haagens.com/oldtype.tpl.html](http://haagens.com/oldtype.tpl.html) for
general phototypesetting history, featuring gems like: _There was a romantic
tradition, in [the US] at least, of the drifter Typesetters, who were good
enough at the craft to find work wherever they traveled. They 'd work in one
town until they wanted a change and then drift on. They had a reputation for
being well read, occasionally hard drinking, strong union men who enjoyed an
independence particularly rare in the 19th century._[0]

It's amazing how interlinked typesetting and computing are. Here we have a
_troff_ link, then there's the _PDF_ (from _postscript_ ) and _TeX_ world,
keyboard layouts, telegrams, rotating drums and early mechanical cryptography,
etc.

If anyone's interested in good collections on the history of printing, I can
recommend both the Museum of Printing and Graphic Communication ( _Musée de
l’imprimerie et de la communication graphique_ ) in Lyon, France[1] and the
National Technical Museum ( _Národní technické muzeum_ ) in Prague, Czech
Republic,[2] which also sports the best permanent exhibition on the history of
photography I have ever seen (by a long shot). For those of you in California,
there's also the International Printing Museum[3] in Carson (open 10-4PM
Saturdays).

[0] Added to 'Hackers of History' section of my fortune clone @
[https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

[1]
[http://www.imprimerie.lyon.fr/imprimerie/](http://www.imprimerie.lyon.fr/imprimerie/)

[2] [http://www.ntm.cz/en](http://www.ntm.cz/en)

[3] [http://www.printmuseum.org/](http://www.printmuseum.org/)

~~~
cafard
Mark Twain was a suppose the best known author to have been employed as a
typographer. For that matter, one of the vagabonds in _Huckleberry Finn_ , I
forget whether Duke or Dauphin, evidently knows his way around the type case
and the press.

The Monotype System must have been one of the earliest uses of paper tape for
encoding information--see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotype_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotype_System)
.

------
gre
Unix stderr not
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_error](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_error)

------
pflanze
I wasn't aware that Microsoft Windows supported a stderr filehandle separate
from stdout. When I worked a little on it about 17 years ago, I thought it
didn't have that (e.g. warnings from Perl were intermixed with redirected
stdout or so). Did I misinterpret something or has the system been changed?

(Edit: that was longer ago than I first remembered; it was on Windows NT.)

~~~
photokandy
Yeah, Windows NT Workstation 3.1 was the first Windows to have stderr
redirection[1]. Windows 95, 98 and Millennium (oh, that horrid edition. I
actually bought it! Gag.) don't support redirecting STDERR according to
Wiki[2].

[1] [https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/kb/110930](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/110930)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMMAND.COM#Redirection.2C_pip...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMMAND.COM#Redirection.2C_piping.2C_and_chaining)

~~~
NonEUCitizen
You _can_ redirect stderr on Windows (nowadays) -- it's mentioned in your
first link. Example:

my.exe 2> err.txt

~~~
photokandy
Yes -- I was just indicating that WinNT was the first Windows to do it. Every
Windows based on the NT kernel supports stderr redirection. Win95, 98, and ME
didn't, since they were on a different kernel.

 _Still_ can't believe I bought ME. _sigh_

------
kylebgorman
But, where did you read standard error during the teletype era? Was it printed
to a separate tape?

~~~
lstamour
On the PDP-11, I'd presume, via video terminal or some kind of typewritten
(non-photoset) output? The standard out went to the typesetter then, is my
reading of it.

~~~
kjs3
On a PDP-11, some sort of line printer. Video terminals weren't common as
console devices in those days.

