ASCII was created in the 1960s. That's around the time when the industry wasn't really sure if all files were just going to be a stream of bytes that were compl

ASCII was created in the 1960s. That's around the time when the industry wasn't really sure if all files were just going to be a stream of bytes that were completely up to programs to interpret, or if it was the OS's responsibility to enforce a database-like structure on all disk-like I/O.