Maybe I am misunderstanding your interpretation of the underscore, but IBM invented it... In IT, which has been my profession since 1983, can represent many variables in different programming languages. BB did not introduce this in anyway, shape or form.
What does this have anything to do with trading equities?
IBM's EBCDIC character-coding system, introduced in 1964, added the underscore, which IBM referred to as the "break character." IBM's report on NPL (the early name of what is now called PL/I) leaves the character set undefined, but specifically mentions the break character, and gives RATE_OF_PAY as an example identifier.[1] By 1967 the underscore had spread to ASCII,[2] replacing the similarly-shaped left-arrow character (?) previously residing at code point 95 (5F hex) in ASCII-1963 (see also: PIP). C, developed at Bell Labs in the early 1970s, allowed the underscore as an alphabetic character.[3]
Underscore predates the existence of lower-case letters in many systems, so often it had to be used to make multi-word identifiers, as CamelCase (see below) was not available.
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