alt Hacker NewsBut does it really matter what the details were? The most important thing is that the standard published in 1963 was 7-bit. I mentioned that the 1963 version did not include lowercase letters. The (unpublished) 1965 version, mentioned on the first scan page, did.
As for the name, the acronym ASCII comes from the 1963 version (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). Later in 1966, ASA became USASI, and the official name was changed to USASCII, with ASCII as an acceptable alternative abbreviation. Later still, in 1969, USASI changed its name once again to ANSI, and an attempt was made to rename it ANSCII, but this did not catch on, and ASCII returned as the official name.
As for this 8-bit extension (not seven-bit code proposed by the ISO), perhaps they were referring to ECMA-35, the first version of which was published in December 1971? Or perhaps other proposals mentioned in the brief history. Of course, it seems that ASCII - regardless of the version - served as the basis for these extensions.
https://ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-35_1s...
My point was that before the 1967 version, ASCII had no influence whatsoever on the design of computer architectures, because it was useful only for transmission on serial communication lines and it remained compatible with the use of 6-bit character sets for storing character strings in the computer memory.
Only after the number of printable characters had been greatly increased in 1967, making impossible the conversion to 6-bit character sets, and the new version was adopted not only in USA, but also internationally, by both ISO and CCITT, it became a necessity to have a byte size equal to or greater than 7 bits, in order to be able to store efficiently ASCII strings in computers.
From that moment on, the 8-bit byte size became a hard requirement for any new computer ISA, e.g. for DEC PDP-11, which was designed mostly during 1969 and it was launched in 1970.