Now, see, that's the kind of ignorance the article was trying to treat.  It's very much not microsoft's fault.  Early teletypes had two command bytes:  "\n" (newline) would advance the paper, and "\r" (carriage return) would move the type head (on a typewriter, the paper carriage -- thus the name) back to the start of the line.  If you wanted to do both, you had to send both.<p>So if you have a text file to print, you'll either need to include both command bytes or else have some "terminal driver" software do the translation for you from a single "end of line" marker.  This feature was a Unix innovation.  It didn't exist in other contemporary systems (VMS, for instance, from which CP/M and MS-DOS stole lots of other ideas).<p>So the problem was that Gary Kildall, in 1977, failed to recognize the great idea Unix had and cloned VMS behavior instead (and Bill Gates likewise cloned CP/M instead of Unix).  And due to backwards compatibility pressure we're still living with the result.  But it's clearly not a case of someone having made the "wrong choice".