an odd question

From: Jeff Hellige <jhellige_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Thu Aug 9 09:15:17 2001

on 8/9/01 9:47 AM, Dan Wright at dtwright_at_uiuc.edu wrote:
> not sure if this is exactly on-topic, but I figure if anyone would know, it
> would be this bunch... where did the convention of using "^x" to represent
> "Ctrl-x" come from? I wonder because you see that convention everywhere, but
> it's totally non-intuitave -- i.e. why does the carat symbol mean "hold
> control
> while pressing the following key"? I think this came up because someone
> pointed out that using pine the first time was really hard until they figured
> out what "^" meant. so, anyone know where that convention came from?

    I believe Wordstar used to display the control sequences for cut and
pasting and other block move type commands in that format in it's menus.
I'm almost positive that versions of Worstar I was using on XT-clones in the
mid-80's were like that. At the time, quite a large number of text editors,
including those included with programs such as TurboBasic, used the Wordstar
commands and conventions as well.

    Jeff
Received on Thu Aug 09 2001 - 09:15:17 BST