this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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0-255 was good enough for me an my grandpappy.
0-127, top bit is always 0.
i thought the top bit was originally 0 or 1 depending on the evilness/odiousness of the rest of the number, as a parity check.
The standard itself is 7-bit, since wires were deemed more valuable than endpoint logic for the teletype machines way back then. If you're running it on an 8-bit byte machine you could do it either way, although I'm not sure what the point in parity checking individual characters is. Modern software uses 0.