To elaborate on my answer to a related question:
A carriage is the part of a typewriter that controls where on the page the next character will appear.
It will move the page a long with each character typed.
To get the carriage back to the right (or left, if you write from the right) a carriage return is performed.
For more information on typewriters, see this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter
So on computers, that use control characters (different combinations on different operating systems, but always involving \r
or \n
) to control where the next character will appear, there is no carriage to return, the cursor movement is controlled by software and electronics.
So what is meant by
even though your computer might not have a carriage that returns
is that computers do not have the mechanical part called a carriage, but they still do carriage returns.