(snip, someone wrote) > You've sometimes admonished me for taking the synchronic view > rather than the diachronic. But here, you're being narrowly > synchronic. In the Bad Old Days of Yore, mechanical serial > printers could be commanded to underscore with the sequence > <underscore><backspace><character-to-be-underscored>. In this > diachronic perspective, "underscore" is not a misnomer, merely > antiquated.
No, you write a second line with a '+' as carriage control character. This is even so popular as to be a special case for the 3800, which otherwise does not allow writing two characters on one print column. Presumably it builds a record in a buffer, allowing overprint with different fonts, and a special bit to indicate underlining. With ink and ribbon printers, you can get darker print (bold-like) by overprinting the same characters using '+', though I believe that the 3800 also doesn't do that. -- glen
