Leaving The 8-bit World

We still kinda live in an 8-bit world. Our computer systems grew from simple terminals which could only show a limited set of characters. These typically supported ASCII characters and only eight bits long and focused on a US viewpoint of the world (‘a’-’z’,”A’-’Z’, ‘$’ and so on). In ASCII, an ‘a’ is 0x61 in hexadecimal, and 0110 0001 in binary.