> That encoding is, to put it politely, mildly insane: it was designed so that stripping the 8th bit from it leaves you with a somewhat readable ASCII translite

> That encoding is, to put it politely, mildly insane: it was designed so that stripping the 8th bit from it leaves you with a somewhat readable ASCII transliteration of the Russian alphabet, so Russian letters don’t come in their usual order. No, it is not insane. It simply continues the traditional way of creating the national Morse alphabets — almost all of them are transliterations of the international Morse code. Historical continuity is quite a harsh mistress.