@Ange @b0rk
And a lot of those "control character quirks" have just become "how things are done" without anyone ever thinking about how it happened.

You can still use Control-D to exit a shell, Control-G sounds a bell and Control-H is either backspace or delete depending on what kind of computer you're using.

@Ange @b0rk In there also: the Escape character Ctrl-[ which we still use in ANSI escape sequences. (Might be a fun realisation: ah yes, that's why the left square bracket is there and they're called Escape sequences.)

@Ange @b0rk This explains a lot. e.g. why I see ^M in files with weird line encoding, why Ctrl-I works for tab.
A thought occurs: would I be asking too much to be able to do "Ctrl-V Ctrl-J" when entering a substitution in vim to enter a literal line feed (like I do with Ctrl-I for tabs?)?

@Ange typos
- in the list, Start of Text has the letters SOT underlined, but it should be STX
- in the list, Shift In and Shift Out are reversed. They're right in the table

@Ange @b0rk

1) excellent! Thank you for this!

2) this convinced me to start referring to ASCII as a binary file format