JIS X 0201, a Japanese Industrial Standard developed in 1969 (then called JIS C 6220 until the JIS category reform), was the first Japanese electronic character set to become widely used. It is either a 7-bit encoding or an 8-bit encoding, although the 8-bit form is dominant for modern use (or was until Unicode, e.g. UTF-8 took over). The full name of this standard is 7-bit and 8-bit coded character sets for information interchange (). The first 96 codes comprise an ISO 646 variant, mostly following ASCII with some differences, while the second 96 character codes represent the phonetic Japanese katakana signs. Since the encoding does not provide any way to express hiragana or kanji, it is only capable of expressing simplified written Japanese. Nevertheless, it is possible to express, at least phonetically, the full range of sounds in the language. In the 1970s, this was acceptable for media such as text mode computer terminals, telegrams, receipts or other electronically handled data. JIS X 0201 was supplanted by subsequent encodings such as Shift JIS (which combines this standard and JIS X 0208) and later Unicode. History The Comite Consultatif International Telephonique et Telegraphique (CCITT) introduced the International Telegraph Alphabet No.2 (ITA2) code as an international standard, which was the 5-bit Latin encoding. Most countries have their own national standards based on this. In Japan, the Agency of Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) standardized it as the 6-bit character codes of JIS C 0803-1961 (Keyboard layout and codes for teleprinters), which combined with katakana characters. However, it didn't match the industry requirements because the character map was small, and the code layout was impractical. The AIST considered a practical character encoding to replace various codes used in Japan. In 1963, ISO introduced a draft of ISO R 646 (6 and 7-bit coded character sets for information processing interchange). AIST committed the conjunction of ISO R 646 and katakana mapping to the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ). IPSJ formed the code standardization committee. The committee didn't adopt the 6-bit form of ISO's draft because the katakana set couldn't fit into its character map. The early JIS draft mapped small katakana characters next to each of their normal katakana characters. It was considered to be convenient for sorting by Gojūon order. Some committee members criticized it would complicate the mechanic of keyboards which only handled normal katakana characters. The later draft mapped