“In the beginning: ASCII
“In the beginning there was ASCII: a simple set of 127
characters (7 bits). You can see the ASCII table by typing man
ascii.“ASCII was fine for English and most programming languages. But
pretty soon those pesky Spanish, French and German speakers started
complaining: Écoutez! ¡Oye! Paß
auf!“127 characters wasn’t enough for all the characters those
languages needed. So OS vendors started using that 8th bit. That
solved the problem … for about a month, until Greeks, Russians,
Chinese and the rest started demanding ways to type their
languages.”