> So ASCII gradually morphed into an 8 bit language - and that's where the problems began. Oh sweet summer child. No, ASCII itself was a problem. Before we had

> So ASCII gradually morphed into an 8 bit language - and that's where the problems began. Oh sweet summer child. No, ASCII itself was a problem. Before we had 8-bit character sets, we had 7-bit character sets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_646 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_646 This is why IRC considers [\] and {|} to be lowercase and corresponding uppercase letters respectively: it was made by a Scandinavian, and in their character sets, some accented characters occupy the same positions as ASCII [\]{|} would. The story of character sets is the story of evolving common subsets: ISO 646 within ASCII, ASCII within “extended ASCII” (or at least, some variants thereof), Latin-1 within the Unicode BMP, the Unicode BMP within Unicode. Oh and by the way, before we had 7-bit character sets, we had 6-bit (e.g. IBM BCD). And before those, we had 5-bit (e.g. Baudot code). And before that, we had different telegraph codes (variations of Morse code)…