There were 128 characters in the original ASCII specification - and that's because 128 is the largest number that can be represented with 7 bits. ASCII was (and still is) just a simple set of conversion rules to go from numbers to characters. Unicode was the solution to an increasingly important problem in the dawn of computing and the internet: How does my computer communicate with another computer on the other side of the world if that computer "speaks a different language"? One of the most popular "languages" in the early 1980s (especially in the USA) was ASCII - the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It's the organisation that handles the international standards for converting numbers into textual characters. Okay, now on to the long explanation: The long explanation starts with an international organisation called "Unicode".
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