"ASA" is the abbreviation of the American Standards Association, a former name for the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), which has standardized these control characters in "ANSI X3.78-1981(R1992) representation of vertical carriage positioning characters in information interchange".These are also called "FORTRAN control characters" because they first appeared in versions of FORTRAN II in the early 1960s, although they have since been used by other programming languages such as COBOL and PL/I.