This lecture covers the evolution of character encoding standards, starting with ASCII in 1975, which used 7 bits to represent characters. It then introduces ISO 8859-1 from 1985, which extended the character set to 8 bits. Finally, it delves into Unicode from 1987, which significantly expanded the character repertoire using 20 bits. The slides detail the differences in character representation, control characters, and printable characters among these encoding schemes.