@EdyBolos @stux yes, compression existed. There's no mention of it in that clip. Too complicated.

This programme was aimed at an audience of computer illiterates. The closest to a computer most people would've gotten at the time would have been via their gas, electricity or phone bill, bashed out by a chain printer: invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=F

Ian McNaught-Davis refers to 'characters' as a shorthand for 'bytes'. Back then, thanks to seven- or eight-bit #ASCII, any character in the Latin alphabet could be represented by a single byte. (Things are more complicated these days with Unicode having replaced ASCII as the way to represent written human languages.)