Earlier today Stephen Johnson, in a mailing list run by the The Unix Heritage Society, described the birth of the standard error concept: the idea that a program's error output is sent on a channel different from that of its normal output. Over the past forty years, all major operating systems and language libraries have embraced this concept. The story starts with the Graphic Systems' C/A/T phototypesetter used by the Bell Labs in the 1970s. This, washing-machine sized, equipment would typeset ...