American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)

American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is a character encoding standard used for representing text in computers, communications equipment, and other electronic devices. It is the most widely used character encoding standard, with more than 100 million official codepoints being defined.

ASCII was originally developed in 1963 by Bob Bemer and Ray Johnson of the American Standards Association committee for the Information Interchange. Its purpose was to provide a uniform means of representing text in online communications, facilitating exchange of data between computers of different designs. The standard was first published in 1968 as “American Standard Code for Information Interchange.”

ASCII uses a 7-bit binary code to represent 128 characters. It includes the numerals 0-9, the 26 English letters with both upper and lower cases, the punctuation symbols found on standard typewriters and keyboards, and several control codes. These control codes are primarily used in communications protocols such as FTP and Telnet.

ASCII has been used in computing since the 1970s. It is essential for developing many computer programs and operating systems, and it’s still the primary encoding used for text in files stored on digital devices. Many websites still use ASCII for their underlying HTML markup, and it is regularly used for writing server programs in most scripting languages.

ASCII is also important in electronic communications. It was the primary encoding used in the transmission of emails until the mid-1990s. It is still commonly used for transmitting plain text between computers in emails, online chatrooms, and other text-based applications.

ASCII has also been adapted by numerous other standards. By adding further codepoints, the standard functions in many languages, including Spanish, German, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese. It is also the basis of the Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) and Unicode, two competing standards which have taken ASCII’s place as the de facto standard for encoding text in computers.