American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is a widely used character encoding standard that is employed in electronic communication and computer systems. ASCII is a seven-bit code that represents text and symbols as numeric values, allowing the interchange of information between different computing devices.
ASCII comprises a set of 128 characters, including upper and lower case letters, numbers, punctuation marks, control characters, and non-printable characters. Each character is assigned a unique binary code representation, enabling its representation in digital form. For example, the letter 'A' is represented by the binary code 01000001.
The ASCII standard was developed in the early 1960s by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to establish a uniform character set that could be easily understood and processed by different computer systems and devices. ASCII encoding quickly gained popularity due to its simplicity, compatibility, and widespread adoption across various industries.
ASCII provides a foundational basis for text communication in many computing domains, including telecommunications, data storage, programming languages, and internet protocols. It allows textual data to be stored, transmitted, and rendered accurately on different platforms, regardless of hardware or software compatibility. Despite its early limitations, ASCII has served as a fundamental precursor to extended character encoding standards like Unicode, which supports a broader range of characters, including non-Latin scripts and symbols.
In summary, ASCII is a character encoding standard that facilitates the exchange of textual information by representing characters as unique binary codes. This widely adopted standard remains fundamental for text-based communications in computing and telecommunications.
