>>captivating and enduring language

Arguably, ASCII is more a character encoding system than a language. EBCDIC (IBM's encoding developed for Hollerith cards) somewhat predates it. It was also 8-bit, but their previous version (6 bit) goes back to the 40s.

IBM was part of the ASCII consortium, but they had customers with a huge number of already-punched cards (think Indiana Jones warehouse).

Somewhat related: around that same time, there was disagreement as to whether bits in a byte/word should go left to right or right to left. This difference of opinion was called the 'endian' wars ("end" as in "which end has the most significant bit"). NBD so long as you're not transmitting data, but once datacomms is a thing...

Fun times!