Seven Bit Encoding

I’m gonna write ‘em off, A seven bit encoding’s all we can afford, That ought to be enough, When we’re running at three hundred baud, And the teleprinter clatters in the silence of the machine room, Back and forth across the page like a Jacquard loom, And the message coming down the wire ends control zero, Look at your ASCII chart, Every single one’s got a story to tell, They’re gonna play their part, From the start of header to the console bell, And if your alphabet has letters that they don’t use in the USA, You'd better check the code page or you’ll find you're in disarray And the message coming down the wire's in KOI-8 Out on the internet, Every single e-mail and website They’re built on Unicode, Information packed into every byte, And I’m reading and I’m reading and I’m reading from the data stream, But I got my ends the wrong way round Now it’s all in Chinese And the messages in my DMs, don’t know what they mean