What does non-ASCll mean ?

In the early days of computers, the government told all the companies "If you guys want to sell stuff to the government, all pieces have to be able to talk to each other. So you get together and make up a system that you can all adhere to." The result was American Standard Code for Information Interchange -- ASCII. It defined a seven bit code with 128 printable characters, and every brand of computer equipment uses that code. Of course, computers use eight bit codes, so it was possible to define another 128 non-ASCII characters, but those definitions were different for each different piece of equipment. There are more codes now, one for every alphabet in the world. But ASCII is still the starting point.