I wouldn't say the "practices" of Multics influenced the recognition of NL in the ASCII standard, for Multics didn't go into use until 1970, while NL was specified by 1965 (see below) with direct reference to the properties of equipment, not operating systems. Just what equipment, I don't know. IBM Selectric perhaps? I recall Multics discussions that specifically cited the standard, in particular Joe Ossanna's liaison between Multics and the TTY 37 design team at Western Electric, circa 1967. Thus it is my understanding that Multics was an early adopter of ASCII's NL convention, not an influencer of it. Quotation from "Proposed revised American standard for information interchange", CACM 8 (April 1965) 207-214: The controls CR and LF are intended for printer equipment which requires separate combinations to return the carriage and feed a line. As an alternative, for equipment which uses a single combination for a combined carriage-return and line-feed operation (called New-Line), NL will be coded at FE 2 [LF]. Then FE 5 [CR] will be regarded as Backspace BS. If the latter type of equipment has to interwork with the former, it may be necessary to take steps to introduce the CR character. One might read the preceding paragraph as advice not only to writers of driver software but also to a future standards committee to undo the curious notion of regarding CR as BS. Unix effectively took it both ways, and kept the original meaning of CR. doug