Not that surprising. It was a big improvement over the 6-bit encodings that came before. All caps! And it was broadly assumed from the 70s onward that the 8t

Not that surprising. It was a big improvement over the 6-bit encodings that came before. All caps! And it was broadly assumed from the 70s onward that the 8th bit extended to a regional character set. Even my 1980s Canadian Apple //e supported displaying French characters, in some variant of Latin-1 I think. The easy extensibility of ASCII on 8-bit-byte systems was a big part of its popularity (and eventually its greatest curse when all the divergent extensions started meeting online). Or just consider how the Japanese put up with computing in pure katakana (their writing system's equivalent of all caps) well into the 1980s.