Spelling out, was Acronyms

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The acronym thread reminded me of an incident that happened a few contracts ago:

Another writer and I were assigned to write separate documents and then swap them for editing - at which point we discovered that we had staggeringly different points of view over the spelling out of some acronyms.

She insisted that *all* acronyms had to be spelled out at first use, preferably first use each chapter.  I insisted that some acronyms had reached the status of words within the computer world (PC, HTML, PCMCIA, IBM, ASCII, IP) and it would be more confusing to the reader by cluttering the document with constant reiterations of what they really meant.

I'd be curious on other comments on this.  Even in a technical document for not-necessarily-technical end users, would you say:

"This mail program uses only ASCII text, meaning the standard characters on your keyboard." 

or

"This mail program uses only American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) text, meaning the standard characters on your keyboard."

Nea Dodson
(who is so used to typing just "ASCII" that I had to go look up what it really means.)

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