The binary representation has the most significant bit first (“big endian”). ASCII is 7-bit; because many have called encodings such as CP437, ISO-8859-1, CP-1252, and others “extended ASCII” some are under the misapprehension that ASCII is 8-bit (1 byte). To understand why Control+i inserts a Tab in your terminal you need to understand ASCII, and to understand ASCII you need know a bit about its