In order to try and shorten this thread, I did a little research. 
According to Thomas Glover's 'Pocket Ref' book (3rd printing, Sept., 1990) 
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. 

	Silly acronym, really, but that's life.

On Fri, 6 Sep 1996, Wing wrote:

On Fri, 6 Sep 1996, Martin Bennett wrote:

Orig> Why is it that some people on this ML insist on writing in formats
Orig> other than US-ASCII standard?! It's *REALLY* annoying when you get a 
Orig> fic and half the characters are all graunched! ;} 
Probably because not everyone on the ml is in us, using us based
program/eq, or their system doesn't support it. 

Orig> - ASCII format and proud! ;}
Ascii What DOES this word mean? ;)  
American Symbollic character something soemhing?
Wing. [ No such thing as all-purpose. Case in point, BASIC. ^_- ]