JIS X 0201 was developed in 1969, a time when computers were generally incapable, both by software design and hardware resources, of representing the thousands of Chinese-based kanji characters used in Japanese. As a compromise, this standard encoded katakana (only – not hiragana or kanji) as a small set of characters, assigned in the upper byte value range of 0x80–0xFF. This allowed 8-bit processors to encode and process Japanese text phonetically (as katakana), though without being able to process hiragana or kanji. These katakana characters were in turn "displayed" as "half-width kana" – a new, unorthodox, narrower form factor to fit the same width as the monospaced Latin alphabets machines were capable of printing and displaying. Encoding-wise, JIS X 0201 is a variant extension of ASCII – it includes additional characters, and does not exactly agree with ASCII on the overlapping part (the Latin character section).-width kana were developed as "... the first Japanese characters encoded on computers because they are used for Japanese telegrams."