ASCII

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a widely used character encoding standard that represents text in computers and other devices. It was developed in the early 1960s by a committee led by Robert W. Bemer to establish a consistent and universal character set for electronic communication and data interchange.

The ASCII character set consists of a total of 128 characters, including control characters (such as line feed, carriage return, and tab) and printable characters (which represent letters, digits, punctuation marks, and other symbols). Each character is assigned a unique numerical value between 0 and 127.

In ASCII, each character is represented by a 7-bit binary code. This binary representation allows computers to store and process text using a standard encoding scheme. For example:

• The capital letter 'A' is represented by the ASCII code 65 (binary: 01000001).
• The digit '3' is represented by the ASCII code 51 (binary: 00110011).
• The exclamation mark '!' is represented by the ASCII code 33 (binary: 00100001).

ASCII provides a way for different computer systems to communicate and exchange text data by using a common character set. It has become the foundation for many other character encoding schemes, including extended ASCII, Unicode, and UTF-8.

It's worth noting that ASCII is limited to the representation of English characters and a few common symbols. As technology advanced and the need for multilingual support arose, more comprehensive character encoding standards like Unicode were developed to encompass a wider range of characters from different writing systems around the world.