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aiusepsi t1_je4ogqj wrote

Reply to comment by theBarneyBus in ELI5: If digital data is stored in 0s & 1s, how does the reader know how many of the digits to take into consideration? by distinct_oversight

ASCII actually only uses 7 bits per letter, but because the smallest block of bits that a typical computer can individually access is 8 bits, the 8th bit goes unused and is always 0.

Which turned out to be very useful; the extra bit can be used for backwards-compatible extensions to ASCII, like UTF-8, which can represent characters not available in ASCII.

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