Caret notation
From Computer History Wiki
Caret notation is the convention of writing ASCII control characters with a ^
and a character in the range @
to _
, or ?
. ^?
denotes DEL, and the others the range 0 to 31.
The earliest known use of this notation is from Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-6 manuals, where the earlier ASCII 1963 character ↑
was used.