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I'm imagining the fax arriving, "Purchase order, To: emergency support, Payable: #1200.00"

Btw as a point of order, the £ symbol isn't ASCII anything. ASCII (US-ASCII) actually does stop at decimal 127 which was a type of Delete code (DEL), and basically, only US needs are served by ASCII.

I think I recall that certain (Epson?) printers could be set for UK use by a DIP switch setting that mainly caused £ to be printed on paper when the ASCII code of # was received. So the PC could be allowed to output # when it wanted £.

£ was decimal code 156 on a PC, and then 163 in what Windows calls "ANSI", which is just an acronym of a US standards body. So you could and can (?) hold down Alt and key 156 on the PC number pad to type £, but in Windows you also can do Alt and 0163.

These and Unicode UTF-8 include at least the printable codes of ASCII, but codes outside the range decimal 0 to 127 are not ASCII.