I suspect that these escape codes originated in B, the assembly level programming language for the Honeywell 6000 GCOS. This language was developed at Bell Labs based on the British language called BCPL. Because BCPL was pretty verbose, the B developers simplified the syntax and added things like curly braces to replace BEGIN and END. Where the name B came from, because it was an abbreviated form of BCPL.
Later, some people at Bell Labs created a language that was B's successor, mainly by adding typing and a standard I / O library. Since he was the successor to B, they chose the next letter in the name of BCPL.
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