>>123This gets linked way too often. ` was described as a left quotation mark (and ' as a right one) in ASCII. The original ASCII. That is, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. He puts way too much emphasis on X, which came, what, two decades later?
There are a few other problems in the article too, notably that he's guilty of the exact same things he's complaining about (using ASCII symbols instead of their more specific Unicode equivalents). I actually emailed him about all this a year or two ago, but he never replied.