In 1964 the GOST standards body of the Soviet Union defined the standard for encoding data. This standard allowed a variable character size, depending on the type of data being encoded.
GOST 10859 only allowed uppercase characters. Subsequent Soviet standards included lowercase:
- GOST 19768/74
- GOST 19768/87
- GOST 13052
These include the non-ASCII "⏨" (Decimal Exponent Symbol U+23E8). It was used to express real numbers in scientific notation. For example: 6.0221415⏨23.
The "⏨" character was also part of the ALGOL programming language specifications and was incorporated into the then German character encoding standard ALCOR. GOST 10859 also included numerous other non-ASCII characters/symbols useful to ALGOL programmers, e.g.: ∨, ∧, ⊃, ≡, ¬, ≠, ↑, ↓, ×, ÷, ≤, ≥, ° & ∅. c.f. ALGOL operators[1].
The "␡" character served the same function as the "␡" in 7-bit ASCII.
7-bit code: Cyrillic & Latin upper-case letters
Cyrillic and Latin letters with identical (A, B, C, E, H, K, M, O, P, T, X) and similar (Y/У) glyphs were unified.