That's what 7-bit ASCII does to the French language.

You had seven bits to work with? I was working with 6 bit CDC display code. You couldn't even do the letter "e" on that machine, you had to be content with "E". That's ok, we didn't have any printers that could print lower case anyways. (Hmmm ... I recall some terminals that didn't do lower case either).

On the other hand, the other machine I worked on encoded file names in RAD50 (Radix 50). 50 octal is 40 decimal. 40**3 = 64000 which is less that 2**16. Encoding characters in RAD50 meant that you could get 3 (yes, 3!) characters in a 16 bit word. A file name (6 character basename and 3 character extension) all fit into 3 words.

I remember spec'ing out an early system that was going to use ASCII to represent the data. It was a big deal. One of the users of the system pulled me aside one day and wondered what all the fuss was with this "ASK TWO" stuff.

To go from fighting propriety character encodings to a standard that could talk to the computer across the room was a big step forward. That they couldn't talk to computers across the ocean yet was not really on the horizon.