Sure, I guess my point was that in the beginning, on old teletype systems, these were separate mechanical operations. Carrying them over as separate key codes

Sure, I guess my point was that in the beginning, on old teletype systems, these were separate mechanical operations. Carrying them over as separate key codes made sense still because they had separate semantics to everyone at the time. Not that they didn't think combining them would be a good idea but that combining them didn't occur to the contemporaries at the time.