Right, it was for controlling terminals originally.
I recall in the early 90s I worked for an ag chemical company as an intern. They had a horrid budgeting app written on some old crusty DB platform, I was asked to make the text interface “better”.
We accessed via VT terminal emulators, so I created a library of ANSI drawing primitives and created a primitive window / menu system out of it. It blew everyone’s mind at the time, but it was only a couple of week’s work.
* Edited to add a lot of DOS software and terminal stuff did similar things, including some nifty Terminate and Stay Resident utilities (TSR!).
EDIT: what I find is missing on the post is Teletext art (see e.g., http://teletextart.co.uk/)