That kind of box drawing was pretty common on 8-bit character map systems, like Commodore 64 and I'd guess also on game consoles, like Nintendo Entertainment System.
A related trick was to adjust the colors so that, for example, the background for one character looks like foreground of an adjacent character. I used this to draw thick boxes in one program without wasting a couple extra rows of display. (Though the trick was revealed if you did a B&W screenshot printout. There was no text selection©&paste in MS-DOS at the time.)
E.g. here's "PETSCII" [1], the Commodore character set, and as you can see there's a number of characters that provides different thickness "borders" on the left/right/top/bottom.
Here's a page with a number of "PETSCII" images using the same method to have borders in images with the other colour firmly on one side of the line [2]
As for modern usage, here's a tiny image from my personal terminal text editor, which uses the same method with unicode to get a shaded transition between the line numbers and the main display area [3].
[1] https://www.petscii.de/images/PETSCII_MODE_02.png
[2] https://oldmachinery.blogspot.com/2020/09/petscii-petscii-pe...
https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
I would find it remarkable if all these accomplished scientific experimenters and scholars first encountered it here
Not impossible but I think Occam's razor would suggest there might be domain specific nuances to the implementation that makes it special.
On the other hand I've certainly encountered a ton of stupidly obvious techniques in my 30 years of programming which I thought were unremarkable only to discover people have developed a special language and narrative history of attribution to it.
You swim through the jargon presuming it's profound and enlightening but then ultimately get disappointed. It's an emotionally impactful experience so I tend to remember it.
There's some interesting discussion on stackexchange at [1], the comment I link to reports on some investigation they did. Apparently, the Tai of Tai's Model misinterpreted other people's use of the trapezoid rule, found that misinterpreted version to be faulty, re-invented it, and named it after herself. One assumes that it was an honest mistake, but it's a damned shame that it didn't get caught in review.
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