[thaumasiotes]

I always thought it was interesting that ASCII is transparently just a bunch of control codes for a typewriter (where "strike an 'a'" is a mechanical instruction no different from "reset the carriage position"), but when we wanted to represent symbolic data we copied it and included all of the nonsensical mechanical instructions.

[adzm]

Well the control codes were specifically for TTY rather than typewriters, many of the control codes still make sense from that standpoint.