VT52 and VT100 are 24x80 and 25x80 RS232 terminals that were produced by DEC. They had particular control characters that were assigned to the special functions to move the cursor on the screen up, down, left or right. The assignments made were vendor specific and not inside of the standard 7-bit ASCII character set.

Other terminal vendors including...
Lear Sigler
Beehive
Infoton
Televideo
IBM
Zentec
&& dozens of others

...all used various schemes to move the cursor around including the use of control characters.

Michael Karas