True, but I don’t think there was a common reason to ever send a linefeed without going back to the beginning. Were people printing lots of vertical pipe characters at column 70 or something?

It would’ve been far less messy to make printers process linefeed like \n acts today, and omit the redundant CR. Then you could still use CR for those overstrike purposes but have a 1-byte universal newline character, which we almost finally have today now that Windows mostly stopped resisting the inevitable.

> now that Windows mostly stopped resisting the inevitable

I've been trying to get Visual Studio to stop mucking with line endings and encodings for years. I've searched and set all the relevant settings I could find, including using a .editorconfig file, but it refuses to be consistent. Someone please tell me I'm wrong and there's a way to force LF and UTF-8 no-BOM for all files all the time. I can't believe how much time I waste on this, mainly so diffs are clean.

As I understand it (this may be apocryphal but I've seen it in multiple places) the print head on simple-minded output devices didn't move fast enough to get all the way back over to the left before it started to output the next character. Making LF a separate character to be issued after CR meant that the line feed would happen while the carriage was returning, and then it's ready to print the next character. This lets you process incoming characters at a consistent rate; otherwise you'd need some way to buffer the characters that arrived while the CR was happening.

Now, if you want to use CR by itself for fancy overstriking etc. you'd need to put something else into the character stream, like a space followed by a backspace, just to kill time.