ASCII was actually invented in the US in the 1960s, as a
standardised way of encoding text on a computer. ASCII
defined 128 characters, that's a character for half of the
256 possible bytes in an 8-bit computer system.
Uh? Wouldn't it be easier to just say that it's a 7-bit coding system? And what does he mean by "256 possible bytes in an 8-bit computer system"?
"7 bits" versus "half of 8 bits" are two slightly different things. One has a padding, the other does not. So the file size for a 7 bit encoding would be slightly smaller than an 8 bit one.
