That's what I thought too. And WordStar and WordPerfect predated this character set by a couple of years, and then MultiMate and Word after.
But googling screenshots of all of them, I can't find any use of this character in their rulers. It's all dots, numbers, and bracket symbols.
So I think the end of the article is right -- it's a delta triangle that, for various reasons, got corrupted into that shape:
> If even the actual Greek uppercase delta is, quite unmistakenly, rendered as a house, then the theory that DEL is just a badly formed uppercase Greek delta character with the bottom corners cut off (due to a lack of horizontal pixels) starts to seem more and more convincing.
Yup. There are also a ton of other Greek letters in row E used in math... and no uppercase delta, which you'd obviously want, even more than many of the others. The only reason they wouldn't have included it down there was because they already included it above, exactly because it's DELta.
It still doesn't answer why it's a short uppercase delta though... I can only guess there was a failure of communication somewhere between who chose the character set and who drew the pixels...
I agree; I always thought of it as a kind of cursor / pointer symbol. I used to do high ASCII art (nothing to write home about) and became pretty familiar with CP437, so I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what the "little house" was going to be.
I notice that cp437 has enspace, so I wonder if enspace combined with the "small house", is used to indicate the insertion point, or position between two characters when producing error messages.
Or here as a tab stop in GeoWrite (in the top left, below the “file” menu): https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/commodore64/images/6/68/Ge...
Some mechanical typewriters had physical markers/stops that looked similar. The best I could find in a hurry: https://www.mrmrsvintagetypewriters.com/cdn/shop/files/DSC_7...