Right, but most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy that Intel has to deal with in the name of backwards compatibility.

>most of these are just past crimes^W^Wlegacy

This is completely off topic, but I've seen things like the "^W^W" a few times before, and I don't know what it means.

Is this a weird encoding mismatch thing? is it from some editor/system that people instinctively type? Is it from some other forum which has a strange markup syntax for something?

Emacs/readline bindings for Delete Word. Open up a bash shell, type in `foo bar baz`, then press ctrl-W twice.

'^W' is what would appear instead if you weren't in a readline/emacs editor, but instead a dumb line terminal. Thus, leaving '^W' behind makes it look like you didn't realize what you just corrected is still visible.

It's a joke. I've now explained and ruined it.

Slashdot posters would use ^H^H in their posts (backspace)

It goes back way further than that - probably to the dawn of IRC or so.

I believe it dates back to the unix talk(1) program, quite a bit earlier than IRC.

It’s from the dec terminal emulation, VT100. I think specifically when you connected to like an ansi type system with dec mode. Or something like that, the memories are fuzzy

The keystroke certainly does, but I was talking about people inserting ^h and ^w in the middle of conversations, which is a bit harder to nail down, though the practice is older than the parent thought.

^H was backspace on teletypes, which probably dates back to the 1960's.

Ah okay makes sense! It's amazing the gaps in knowledge I still have with a lot of things.

I've used Linux daily for like 15 years now, and I know about control characters, but since I never really used emacs (or readline beyond the copy+pasted command here or there) I just completely missed the meaning.

Not emacs (it means kill-region there, which deletes the text between the cursor and the mark and saves it in a holding area, fairly close to what windows does when you hit ^x, except the holding area is fancier).

This readline behavior follows a Unix tty driver. I'm not sure off the top of my head which one introduced it. I don't think it was on xenix but am pretty sure some 4.x bsd had it.

In days of yore the joke was always ^H^H after IBM/DEC backspace v delete confusion

"^W" is this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-Transmission-Block_char...

In Unix line editors it is traditionally used to mean 'erase the previous word'.

See also documentation for ASCII (http://www.robelle.com/smugbook/ascii.html for example) for origins of ^C, ^D, ^S, etc.

As an HP3000 programmer I still refer to this link fairly often. Ah MPE, its a strange one.

It’s used the same way strikethrough is used, for reasons others have explained.

^W deletes the last word in readline.

In readline in emacs mode (yes you can switch deadline in vi mode)

Delete word.

I thought it was fairly clear 'q3k was referring to the 64 bit ISA introduced in amd64, not all the legacy stuff either kept around in some form for compatibility (x87, encodings) or stuff that isn't part of long mode (BCD, segmentation, real mode).

It's boring and safe by virtue of familiarity.