[Someone]

Even ignoring additional time needed to send those extra characters, it also was a lot faster than those control-H's, and (I guess) caused way less wear on your printer.

[derefr]

That presumes you're going like A^HAB^HB; you could just emit foo, and then strlen(foo) ^Hs.

[wtallis]

I wonder how precise the backspacing was - how many times could you print a character and backspace before the head had drifted by a full point?