No. 5 and 6 bit codes existed. And according to Wikipedia (which cites a book "Coded Character Sets, History and Development") making ASCII an 8 bit encoding wa

No. 5 and 6 bit codes existed. And according to Wikipedia (which cites a book "Coded Character Sets, History and Development") making ASCII an 8 bit encoding was considered (not to encode more characters, but to embed BCD data efficiently) but not done because reducing the required bandwith for all text by 12.5% represented a really significant cost reduction at that time.