ASCII vs. ANSI vs. UNICODE and all variations?

The purpose of this list is this: given the name of a character set, find out a little bit about it.

[ Character Set List ]

Sure this guide won't tell you why [CTRL]+g is the character [BEL] in ASCII and on some machines will make a beeping noise if you echo or print it to a command window, but this is a great place to start when trying to understand why "text" isn't a good enough description for the file that you are trying to read, or why your "smart quotes" don't look correct in a web browser on another OS.