Well, it's the oldest character set and encoding that's still semi-relevant today. I doubt many people nowadays encounter EBCDIC and the like (and if they do, the article isn't aimed at them, I guess).
For all practical purposes EBCDIC is the "IBM Standard" as opposed to ASCII's "American Standard". The mood in the 70s/80s outside the business world was "In your face IBM!"
And putting "Information Interchange" in the name itself is another "In Your Face" posturing to the mainframe world. We're the future of data transmission and you'd best get used to it, IBM...
ASCII really was a rebellion in the olden times. One that won.
Another story was before ASCII note that teletype codes and such were usually modal, LTRS/FIGS to switch from 5-bit letters to 5-bit numbers. So there's that dramatic great circular wheel of IT where we've oscillated both before and after ASCII between simple encodings and modal encodings. This was an early whine against unicode, who cares about codepages, just embed it like, or in, what amounts to the MIME media type, and glyph-like Asian languages should just be drawn in gif files anyway. Or so the complaints went at that time.
Another design statement story: Kind of like the Uni- in unicode uniting all the extended code pages into one really huge space.
There are other dramatic stories not in the article. For example the Klingon in Unicode movement. Basically about 15 years ago they tried to get Klingon script into unicode, about a decade ago the unicode people (who?) said no, so the Klingon people squatted in the unicode equivalent of what networking people would call RFC1918 space, and its simmered since then. Will Klingon actually make it into unicode officially or not, who knows. You can add to the fire by pointing out that Unicode is already stuffed with scripts that no living human culture currently uses, and numerous glyph symbols (think of math stuff like + or %) On the other hand this would inevitably result in Tolkien Elvish script being included in unicode. And does this really matter one way or the other? And this maps perfectly into the wikipedia battle between the deletionist (expletive deleted) and the inclusionist saviors of humanity. Well maybe that last line was a little biased to my opinions...
There's tons of extra fun drama to tell about unicode and cutting off the story at the founding of ASCII misses some of the fun drama. Aside from some fun drama that wasn't mentioned in a post aimed at non-techs who we're told really like drama. You could probably turn the Unicode story into a trashy reality TV show somehow; Vampire Romance Fiction is going to be a harder translation although I'd love to see it.
[1] http://openlibrary.org/works/OL8019369W/Coded_Character_Sets
There is no technological reason EBCDIC couldn't have been the encoding for the whole desktop revolution, other than the dramatic central control vs local control, mainframe vs desktop thing.
There is some truth to the claim that whenever IBM reached a fork in the road they usually found a way to go both ways, at least for many years in the olden days.
> What’s a byte?
I'm not sure what the target demographic is.
> A byte is a set of 8 bits.
Nitpicking, that's octet, not byte. I believe the distinction was lost and don't think byte has a proper definition anymore.