[thatcks]

I was going to assert that read significantly predates getchar, but it turns out that both may have existed from V1 Unix onward. However, getchar in V1 through V6 had a different EOF value from our familiar modern one of (-1); they all instead returned a 0 byte to indicate EOF.

(The V7 getc/getchar/etc manpage notes this as a BUG, although it doesn't specifically document what the V1-V6 EOF was. Presumably everyone who this was relevant for already knew. All of this is based on the historical Unix trees available through www.tuhs.org.)