Technology Fundamentals
ASCII
Definition
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. It represents 128 specified characters—the numbers 0-9, the letters a-z and A-Z, some basic punctuation symbols, and control codes.
Why It Matters
ASCII was one of the earliest and most influential character encoding standards. It laid the groundwork for how text is represented in computers, and modern standards like UTF-8 are backward-compatible with it.
Contextual Example
In ASCII, the uppercase letter "A" is represented by the decimal number 65 (or binary 01000001). The lowercase "a" is 97 (binary 01100001).
Common Misunderstandings
- Standard ASCII uses only 7 bits, allowing for 128 characters. It does not include accented letters, emojis, or characters from non-English languages.
- Most plain text files on older systems were ASCII-encoded. Today, UTF-8 is the dominant standard.