The salient property of all flavors of ASCII is that each character fits nicely in an 8-bit word. This word size was commonly used in computer memory at the time, and memory was very expensive.
My first programming job was writing software for the MUMPS operating system on a DEC PDP-15, which had an 18-bit word size. PDP-15 MUMPS used 6-bit ASCII (which was uppercase only) because three characters fit nicely in an 18-bit word.
My first programming job was writing software for the MUMPS operating system on a DEC PDP-15, which had an 18-bit word size. PDP-15 MUMPS used 6-bit ASCII (which was uppercase only) because three characters fit nicely in an 18-bit word.