It would be interesting to read how they decided on these specific symbols, or if that knowledge is lost to time. I feel like sometimes standards would benefit from including a non-normative section explaining a bit more of the reasoning behind specific design decisions.
That confused me a lot when I started using Linux as a teenager. There wasn’t really an explanation anywhere, some commands would just show ^Something and assume you’d know what to do. When I finally figured out, the terminal made a lot more sense.
These didn't get much use as far as I know (and many computers of the 60s still used 6-bit characters and not anything resembling ASCII), but I think CP437 became the de-facto representation of the low characters for most of the 80s through at least the mid 90s.
If anyone is old enough to remember Joe Campbell's "C Programmer's Guide to Serial Communications", there was an excellent ASCII wall chart, which used these symbols for the control characters.
Apparently this later became ISO 2047 and most of these characters are mapped into Unicode (with the exception of a few which have reasonable substitutes).
I was wishing for something like this recently so I'm genuinely pleased to know this exists.
Interesting. With a few exceptions (namely, BS/HT/LF/VT), these are identical on what the Amstrad CPC character set (https://archive.org/details/SOFT968TheAmstrad6128FirmwareMan...) looks like. Which was probably a copy from some other character set ROM.
