[Shorel]

In mailing lists and discussion groups, they actually used * as bold marker and _ as italics. Something I wish markdown would have used, instead of ** and *.

[oniony]

Back on Fidonet in the 90s, we used *bold*, _underline_ and /italics/. Makes a lot more sense than what we've ended up with today.

[marssaxman]

Hello, fellow old-timer! I think I kind of still mean that when I use that punctuation, even though I know it will be rendered differently.

[rmilk]

Those punctuation marks make sense and came from old-old school notations for typewritten manuscripts. I remember them from my Strunck and White /Elements of Style/ book from English 1A (sorta-old-timer here). Microsoft Office apps still by default apply those marks for you. Quite annoying when you are trying to send an email with a file spec and it bolds things like *suffix.* Edit: and HN does it as well :)