Reading in the AUUGN vol 1 number 4, p. 15 in letter dated April 5, 1979, from Alistair Kilgour, Glasgow writing to Ian Johnstone, New South Wales about a Unix meeting in the U.K. at University of Kent at Caterbury (150 attended the meeting) with Ken Thompson and Brian Kernighan...

Two paragraphs that I found interesting and fun:

    Most U.K. users were astonished to hear that one thing which has not changed in Version 7 is the default for "delete character" and "delete line" in the teletype handler - we thought we'd seen the last of # and @! What was very clear was that version 7 is a "snapshot" of a still developing system, and indeed neither speaker seemed quite sure of when the snapshot was taken or exactly what it contained. The general feeling among users at the meeting was that the new tools provided with version 7 were too good to resist (though many had doubts about the new Shell). We were however relieved by the assurance that there would never be a version 8!
...
    Finally a quotation, attributed to Steve Johnstone, with which Brian Kernighan introduced his excellent sales campaign for Unix on the first day of the conference: " Using TSO is like kicking a dead whale along the beach". Unix rules.
...

I knew it, it's not just me - those pesky # and @ characters were and still are really annoying! Oh, and never say never. Unix does rule :).

Will

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