Stop the Vertical Tab Madness (2010)

What the heck is a vertical tab? Let's jump in the time machine and head back to when your printer has a printhead that moves horizontally across a single line, and it's slow enough to transfer data and physically move paper and printheads that every hack to increase throughput is worth it.

You get faster throughput by pre-printing your form template, and then using the computer printer to fill in the specifics. But you're still printing "new line, new line, new line" to skip to the next part of the form to fill out.

Enter vertical tabs.

You make a piece of plastic ribbon, line it up with the page, and cut holes where the form fields should go. Then you replace all those "new lines" with "spin the motor until you hit the next hole in the tape."

By analogy with horizontal tab (ASCII \09), you name the invention "vertical tab" (ASCII \0B). You add a backslash escape for it (\v by analogy with \t, \r, and \n).

And then you retire to your raised-floor server room, knowing that you have created a legacy that will out-live you, your printers, your building, your language, your hardware's architecture, even the encoding. (Unicode adopted ASCII's control characters, so \v is part of the Unicode standard -- and they added a printable symbol for vertical tab: ⭿).