"ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a format based on the assumption that there was no need to interchange information with people who used accents on letters, non-Latin characters, or currencies other than dollars."

[Footnote from The Go Programming Language Phasebook authored by David Chisnall and published by Addison Wesley]

And people complain about EBCDIC. :-)

I think EBCDIC was actually worse since it was only a standard if you were using IBM Mainframes. And even then it had code pages that were incompatible with one another (reminds me a little of the whole ISO-8859 mess...). I love Unicode and UTF-8 exist, and that these days character encoding is more or less a solved problem. :)

Well EBCDIC did have it's fair share of issues, but it was designed to solve different problems and with a different mindset to ASCII.
And while it too had it's own issues, it in many cases copped too much flack IMO because it is mainframe related, not due to poor execution to meet design goals set.
That said, Unicode is very much the closest thing to an encoding solution at the moment.