Once upon a time, in a world where I used to have to send and receive BIG files via dial up, I used to dream of how I could utilize my public library’s T1 connection. The computers there had no floppy, no CD, no nothing… I mostly had to receive big files, turn into Director movies, and then mail overnight. The receive part was so painful. The dream was…. could I attach suction cups outfitted with photocells to a CRT in strategic places and have the content I needed to download become rasterized into blinking boxes? Think about that!

-MTPB

If you only needed to store upper case letters (or only lower case letters), you could reduce this even further to characters 32-95, using 6 bits per character, which would leave you with 4 characters for every pixel. (You could still use this technique if you have infrequent case changes by prefixing them with an unused character like a carat. As long as they occur less than once every three characters, you’d still see a size savings.)