It's more likely that it's because they are two separate physical actions (returning the head to the left, and advancing the paper one line). They could be used independently: You could print a line in bold, for instance, by issuing a CR without an LF and then printing the same line again.
A carriage-return operation takes much longer than a single character, or even two or three. It doesn't make sense to issue two characters just to take up time. The printers always had to have some internal buffer memory (and handshaking over the communication lines to say when the buffer is full) in order not to lose any characters.
A carriage-return operation takes much longer than a single character, or even two or three. It doesn't make sense to issue two characters just to take up time. The printers always had to have some internal buffer memory (and handshaking over the communication lines to say when the buffer is full) in order not to lose any characters.