That does have a specific reason, it's not an arbitrary old thing. It's to support terminals that don't do lowercase. Like some old terminals such as Dec VT05 o

That does have a specific reason, it's not an arbitrary old thing. It's to support terminals that don't do lowercase. Like some old terminals such as Dec VT05 or TTYs (the ones that printed on paper often didn't support this or they had a mode-switch character for it rather than separate characters) Old as it is, I'm sure these are still around in some production environments.