Not sure about Romanian, but for many other languages people essentially came up with transliteration schemes (multiple, incompatible, ambiguous) to squeeze your language into ascii.

The resulting text was understandable by the "computer people" but not the general population who did not use the networks back then, perhaps somewhat comparable to when some time ago USA parents encountered the "SMS slang" used by their teenagers.

As you would assume: use ASCII and deduce from context. Many people still do that.

That has lead to phantom diacritics: reading letters in unfamiliar words/names based on what you assume they are. For example some pronounce Chirica as Chirică because they assume someone forgot to type the breve in ă.

Back in the day there were dozens of character sets that were alternatives to US-ASCII. Having once worked on an Email client, I needed to bake in a bunch of translation tables to convert stuff sent that way into UTF-8.