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Comment by jonsen | Hacker News Reader

Inlined formatting commands could be recognised and skipped, just like the //-comments.

Okay, I was going off an old comment from Animats where he said "The Bravo file representation was plain text, followed by a control-Z as an EOF, followed by the formatting information. The compiler just stopped at the control-Z."

So Bravo begat Word, and ^Z survived as EOF into DOS...

^Z in DOS was a holdover from its roots as a CP/M clone. CP/M in turn cribbed it from certain DEC OSes, because that's what Gary Kildall used while making CP/M. So ^Z is a case of convergent evolution.

It's an easy mnemonic for Ctrl-Z to represent the end of something. Also fairly easy to type on a Qwerty keyboard.

  > So ^Z is a case of convergent evolution.

More likely common ancestry, no? DG RDOS also used ^Z to end input (not sure if it was stored in the file); also PARC built their own PDP-10 clones.

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