An excellent anecdote about the 7-bitness of 7-bit ASCII! This is even better than the length of a CD being determined by Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - whether http://www.snopes2.com/music/media/cdlength.htm says that's true or not. The ASR33 Teletype, on which Will Crowther wrote the original version of Adventure, used 7-bit ASCII and paper tape; I suppose Crowther may have written Adventure offline on paper tape and then uploaded it. Which brings me to ask: Wasn't error-checking part of the reason for restricting the character set to 7 bits? With the eighth bit free, it could be set to indicate the parity of the other seven and be used to catch errors in transmission.

Also, Is Ceruzzi's History of Modern Computing otherwise worthwhile? I've wondered about it, but histories of technology and computing seldom deal with interesting material specifics like these.

Hah, I didn't know about the Ninth Symphony meme. I swear there was a point in the mid-1980s when bands were making albums just a little longer than 45 minutes total to discourage taping on one side of a 90 minute cassette.

Yes, the parity bit was definitely also a consideration. I'm not sure which came first (chicken and egg). There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of serious work on the origins of ASCII, beyond the basic narrative.

Ceruzzi's book is definitely worthwhile. He's a serious historian and he knows his stuff (had a chance to have lunch with him once). I also like Martin Campbell-Kelly's recent history of software, which bears the rather ungainly title of From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog (also MIT).