Article: Some software assigned special meanings to ASCII characters sent to the software from the terminal. Operating systems from Digital Equipment Corporation, for example, interpreted DEL as an input character as meaning "remove previously-typed input character", and this interpretation also became common in Unix systems. Most other systems used BS for that meaning and used DEL to mean "remove the character at the cursor".[citation needed] That latter interpretation is the most common now.[citation needed]

Now answer this question: What did some software do to the ASCII characters?
assigned special meanings