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.