Editing Backtick (section)

===Incorporation into ISO 646 and ASCII===
{{further|ISO/IEC 646}}
The incorporation of the grave symbol into ASCII is a consequence of this prior existence on typewriters. This symbol did not exist independently as a [[sort (typesetting)|type]] or [[Hot metal typesetting|hot-lead]] printing character.

{{blockquote|It appears to have been at their May 13–15, 1963 meeting that the CCITT decided that the proposed ISO 7-bit code standard would be suitable for their needs if a lower case alphabet and five diacritical marks, including the grave accent, were added to it. At the October 29–31 meeting, then, the ISO subcommittee altered the ISO draft to meet the CCITT requirements, replacing the up-arrow and left-arrow with diacriticals, adding diacritical meanings to the apostrophe and quotation mark, and making the number sign a dual for the tilde.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://jkorpela.fi/latin1/ascii-hist.html#60|title=Character histories: notes on some ASCII code positions}}</ref> |source=Yucca's free information site}}
Thus, ISO{{nbsp}}646 was born and the ASCII standard updated to include the backtick and other symbols.{{efn|ISO{{nbsp}}646 (and ASCII, which it includes) is a standard for 7-bit encoding, providing just 96 printable characters (and 32 [[control characters]]). This was insufficient to meet the needs of Western European languages and so the standard specifies certain [[code points]] that are available for national variation. The code point allocated to backtick is 0x60 (decimal 96) is one such. Consequently, code-point 0x60 was often reallocated in local character sets to a more useful character. For example, in the French ISO{{nbsp}}646 standard, the character at this position is ''[[Micro-|μ]]''. Many older UK computers (such as the [[ZX Spectrum]] and [[BBC Micro]]) have the [[pound sign]] (£) symbol at character 0x60, although [[Code page 1013|BS 4730]] (the British ISO{{nbsp}}646 variant) placed '£' at position 0x23 instead. With the arrival of 8-bit "[[extended ASCII]]", this issue was largely mitigated, though not fully resolved until [[Unicode]] was established.}}