The technique of creating special characters by overstriking i.e. superimposing two characters on top of each other was common on typewriters. This was carried over to printer terminals and was used heavily in a language called APL on the S/360 using a 2741 terminal; see APL demonstration 1975 for an example of this (5:20 and 20:00 into the video).
My question is, how was this handled by the terminal and computer? For example after entering the four characters ⎕ BS ÷ CR i.e. quad,backspace,divide,carrier return to create the symbol for matrix division ⌹
, did the terminal interpret this as a special sequence and replace quad
,backspace
,divide
with a character for matrix division before sending it to the computer, or did the terminal send all four characters unmodified and let the computer figure out where to look for overstruck characters?