Programmers also had to handle text-strings *within* their programs, eg for labelling printed output, and these techniques were used in writing their editors and formatters as well. (An early programmers’ quandary: to save strings in uniform 80-character records, or in variable-lengths, marked with a zero at the end, or with a length count at the beginning? Such decisions sometimes depended on the convenience for a given system, but like QWERTY may endure today.) As new hardware and software were created, their requirements for character sets also led to compatibility problems. While typesetters and electric-typewriter-based printers (like the Flexowriter) supported both upper and lower case text, punchcards supported only upper case and required formatting codes to distinguish lower. A six-bit uppercase character set was standardised by ASA in 1963, followed by the seven-bit ECMA standard in 1965 that led to ASCII (see below). IBM took a diffe
