Older programmers like you are not old enough. (-: ASCII had variable numbers of bytes per glyph back in the 1960s, and the Teletype Model 37 semantics of com

Older programmers like you are not old enough. (-: ASCII had variable numbers of bytes per glyph back in the 1960s, and the Teletype Model 37 semantics of combining-backspace and combining-underscore still exist in modern operating systems, like the various BSDs and Linux-based ones, to this day. It's a combining-characters multibyte encoding understood by programs from less(1) through ul(1) to nroff(1). ASCII had multiple transfer encodings, from 8N1 to 7E2, many of which were neither 7-bit nor 8-bit; and 1 byte of RAM was not 1 ASCII character. 1 byte of RAM not being 1 ASCII character is, after all, what brought about "extended ASCII". Along with that came ECMA-35, with its GR and GL, and code pages. All of those broke theretofore held truths such as that one could just strip the parity bit, actually introduced the false idea (that many people had to keep correcting) that ASCII was 8-bit, and required a full-blown state machine for parsing ECMA-35 escape sequences. Then there are the tales that old programmers can tell about how they couldn't actually deal in English because ASCII didn't have a pound symbol, and what was "English" was actually American (which was, after all, the "A" in "ASCII"). There is a whole generation of older programmers who laugh hollowly at the idea of "the simplicity of ASCII"; when the amount of time that they spent fiddling with serial protocol settings, transcoding between code pages, handling language variant characters in Teletext, wondering why an 8-bit-clean transport protocol such as TCP didn't mean that SMTP could be 8-bit clean, and doing other such stuff, probably came to years in total spent on all of this "simplicity".