Space doesn't just move the cursor on a display; it will obliterate a character cell with a space glyph. When a display terminal has nondestructive backspace (

Space doesn't just move the cursor on a display; it will obliterate a character cell with a space glyph. When a display terminal has nondestructive backspace (backspace character doesn't erase), it can be software emulated with BS-SPACE-BS. At your Linux terminal, you can do "stty echoe" (echo erase) to turn this on (affecting the echoing of backspace characters that are input, not all backspace characters). Dial-up BBSes had this as a configurable setting also.