When I first went online, I quickly became accustomed to the text-only medium where people would use such inline signaling to denote emphasis or some meta-quality of the text. We always said *sigh* and *cough* on the MUDs of the early 90s, and Usenet as well. There, see how I put "said" as if the text-chat is verbal conversation?
One thing that surprised me is how this usage rippled out into the mainstream. I had a text chat in 1999, with a friend from the nightclubs, a totally non-technical mother of two, and she was using *l* and other little asterisk-shortcuts. I thought it was wild because she'd never been a mudder, MySpace was barely a thing yet, and here we are understanding these asterisk expressions.
I have also noticed something as the convention perists: people use these signals even when they don't need them. When rich-text markup is possible, when you could simply put italics, bold type, underlined text, colors, different font face, people still bracket words in asterisks, _underscores_, or <angle brackets>.
I've seen a lot of noobs who see instructions like "name your file <YOUR NAME> <TOPIC>" and then they literally create a file named "<JOE BOB> <PHYSICS>" and so you have to explain to them about the early days of the Internet and ASCII-only interfaces and how those angle brackets are metasyntactic cues that you take out of the final product.
> I've seen a lot of noobs who see instructions like "name your file <YOUR NAME> <TOPIC>" and then they literally create a file named "<JOE BOB> <PHYSICS>" and so you have to explain to them about the early days of the Internet and ASCII-only interfaces and how those angle brackets are metasyntactic cues that you take out of the final product.
I have co-workers who have a ton of trouble understanding man pages because of that.
Isn't it interesting how Unix was originally designed as a word processor, and nroff/troff were fantastic, advanced ways to express typesetting of text, and yet manpages still had to display attractively on a vt100.
This doesn't quite follow on from your point but I still like using plaintext and emphasising using asterisks etc. in mail. Firstly, my mail client messes up with them. Secondly a mail client that actually works correctly like Outlook tends to bulk out massively with HTML (because that's how it's represented). Swap a few dozen of these HTML emails with a colleague, then look at the source and you can sometimes see it exploding into megabytes, which might render correctly (in Outlook anyway), but it certainly offends my programmer sensibilities of efficiency.
Back in the day, in my circles, asterisks were for bold or general emphasis. Italics were represented by /forward slashes/, and underlines by _underscores_.
One thing that surprised me is how this usage rippled out into the mainstream. I had a text chat in 1999, with a friend from the nightclubs, a totally non-technical mother of two, and she was using *l* and other little asterisk-shortcuts. I thought it was wild because she'd never been a mudder, MySpace was barely a thing yet, and here we are understanding these asterisk expressions.
I have also noticed something as the convention perists: people use these signals even when they don't need them. When rich-text markup is possible, when you could simply put italics, bold type, underlined text, colors, different font face, people still bracket words in asterisks, _underscores_, or <angle brackets>.
I've seen a lot of noobs who see instructions like "name your file <YOUR NAME> <TOPIC>" and then they literally create a file named "<JOE BOB> <PHYSICS>" and so you have to explain to them about the early days of the Internet and ASCII-only interfaces and how those angle brackets are metasyntactic cues that you take out of the final product.