[kcartlidge]

In my youth I used to use BCD to handle large numbers and mathematics, so bit/byte representations have always been of interest. In that regard, I really appreciated the Infocom text compression.

Use your favourite seach engine to look up ZSCII which, roughly, is three characters per two bytes (five bits each) with special markers to switch between three different 'alphabets' for what characters the ZSCII bits represent.

Edit: Coincidentally there's a British quiz show called Only Connect, and a few days ago one of the contestants offered xyzzy as an answer to a question where they had to provide the fourth entry in a sequence. The host had never heard of it, and expected a different answer, but it fit and they got the points.