Extended ASCII
With the greater reliability of modern computer systems and networks, a check-bit is no longer needed, so an 8-bit character set is no longer unsafe. Using the extra bit actually doubles the number of values available, giving an extra 128 character values.
There was originally no agreement between system vendors on which extra characters to include, and which values to assign to those characters that they happen to have in common. For example, the Apple Macintosh OS uses the value 142 to represent the character 'é', whereas the same character is given a value of 130 in one configuration of an MS-DOS system. Therefore, a Macintosh text file should not be copied to an MS-DOS system without passing it through a filter that moves the ...
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