elevant to your life. We don't have to go that far back in time.</p>

<p><img style="MARGIN-LEFT: 5px" border="0" alt="ASCII table" align="right" src="/pictures/unicode/ascii.png" width="274" height="146" />Back in the semi-olden days, when Unix was being invented and K&amp;R were writing <a href="http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cbook/">The C Programming Language</a>, everything was very simple. EBCDIC was on its way out. The only characters that mattered were good old unaccented English letters, and we had