“ANSI” was one of the earliest and most basic forms of rich text, again completely built on top of ASCII, and is still used sometimes for terminals today. It allows some basic colors and bold/underline, occasionally supporting double-width or italic.

Oh, yes, ANSI. I’m having flashbacks to all the dark blue text on black background.

I’ve had fights with Word condensing cut-and-pasted text from the web to print; one sticking point was having to search and replace pairs of both CR and LF. Oy vey.

Thanks for the detailed explanation! Sounds like QWERTY–a decision that had good reasons behind it and kinda got stapled into a situation where maybe a different decision would have been made for the purpose, but now everyone’s used to it and it’s good enough the way it is.