What is ASCII?
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a character encoding standard that assigns unique numerical values to letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and other symbols. This standard allows computers and other digital devices to represent and store text data consistently.
How ASCII Works
Each ASCII character is represented by a 7-bit binary number, which means there are 128 possible unique characters (0 to 127). For instance, the uppercase letter 'A' is assigned the decimal value 65 (binary 01000001), while a space is 32. This mapping ensures that text created on one computer can be correctly read and interpreted by another.
An Everyday Example
When you type a letter, say 'H', on your keyboard, the computer translates this into its ASCII numerical code (72). This number is then processed, stored, or transmitted. When another device receives this number, it converts it back to the character 'H' to display it on a screen, making communication seamless.
Importance and Evolution
ASCII was crucial for the early development of computing and remains a fundamental concept. While it efficiently handled English text, its limitation to 128 characters meant it couldn't represent characters from other languages. This led to the development of more extensive encoding standards like Unicode, which can represent nearly all written languages.