It's one of the greatest triumphs of early computing. Not only did it harmonize text representation and transmission in a backwards compatible manner; the fact

It's one of the greatest triumphs of early computing. Not only did it harmonize text representation and transmission in a backwards compatible manner; the fact that they deliberately kept it 7 bit for so long also helped for developing a sane set of other language character sets (ISO-8859), and paved the way for a smooth transition to Unicode (UTF-8) - which is now the dominant encoding worldwide.