Comment by gschizas

UTF-8 is not technically a character set (because it has way more than 256 characters). Characters 32-127 in UTF8 are the same as ASCII, which is the same as the OEM/CP437 and the ANSI/ISO-8859/CP1252.

The characters in CP437 (and other OEM codepages) actually come from the ROM of the VGA (and EGA/CGA/MCGA/Hercules before them).

What you are referring to is those (visually), right? I'm missing some characters in the first line, because HN drops them.

    0123456789abcdef
   0...♥♦♣♠•◘○◙..♪♫.
   1►◄↕‼¶§▬↨↑↓→←∟↔▲▼

As far as I know, the equivalent control characters (characters 0-31) don't have any representation in CP1252, but that's also dependent on the font (since rendering of CP1252 is always done by Windows)

As to their origin, originally the full CP437 character set was taken from Wang word processors. I don't know where Wang took it from, but they probably invented it themselves.

EDIT: There's a more complete history here: https://www.os2museum.com/wp/weird-tales/

EDIT 2: The CP437 character set didn't seem to come directly from Wang; it's just that they took some (a lot) of characters from Wang word processors character sets. The positions of those "graphic" characters was decided by Microsoft when they made MS-DOS (at least according to Bill Gates).