when computers and peripherals standardized on eight-bit bytes in the 1970s, it became obvious that computers and software could handle text that uses 256-character sets at almost no additional cost in programming, and no additional cost for storage. (assuming that the unused 8th bit of each byte was not reused in some way, such as error checking, boolean fields, or packing 8 characters into 7 bytes.) this would allow ascii to be used unchanged and provide 128 more characters. many manufacturers devised 8-bit character sets consisting of ascii plus up to 128 of the unused codes. since eastern europe were politically separated at the time, 8-bit encodings which covered all the more used european (and latin american) languages, such as danish, dutch, french, german, portuguese, spanish, swedish and more could be made, often called "latin" or "roman".