lished in 1968 by ANSI
(American National Standards Institute), with an update in 1977 and
1986. The 7-bit plain ASCII, also called Plain Vanilla ASCII, is a set
of 128 characters with 95 printable unaccented characters (A-Z, a-z,
numbers, punctuation and basic symbols), i.e. the ones that are
available on the English/American keyboard. With the use of other
European languages, extensions of ASCII (also called ISO-8859 or ISO-
Latin) were created as sets of 256 characters to add accented
characters as found in French, Spanish and German, for example ISO
8859-1 (ISO-Latin-1) for French.

Created by Michael Hart in July 1971, Project Gutenberg was the first
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as many literary texts as possible, and to offer them for free in a
digital library open to anyone. Michael explained in August 1998: "We
consider etext to be a new medium, with no real relationship to paper,
other than presenting the same material, but I don't see how paper can
possibly compete once people each find their own comfortable way to
etexts, especially in schools."

Whether digitized years ago or now, all Project Gutenberg books are
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in ASCII, like Chinese, encoded in Big-5.)

Project Gutenberg sees Plain Vanilla ASCII as the best format by far,
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