One of the early standards for storing characters was ASCII. It uses 7 bits to store each character. This allows 128 characters - enough for the numbers 0-9, the upper case letters A-Z, lower case letters a-z, most punctuation marks including spaces, parentheses and braces, and some control characters. But it is not enough for letters used in other languages, such as umlauts used in German and Scandinavian languages. Some systems added an 8th bit to ASCII, for another 128 characters, but the extra characters can vary from one system to another. And this doesn't address all languages. There are thousands of Chinese characters alone. To store all of these characters, Unicode was developed. This uses 16 bits to store 65,536 characters.