Columbia Encyclopedia entry: ASCII
ASCII or American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a set of codes used to represent letters, numbers, a few symbols, and control characters. Originally designed for teletype operations, it has found wide application in computers. A seven-digit (or seven-bit) binary number (see binary system) can represent one of 128 distinct codes. Thus, in decimal equivalents, the series 72, 69, 76, 76, 79 represents the letters h, e, l, l, o in ASCII. With the introduction of its personal computer in 1981, the International Business Machines Company (IBM) increased the number of available characters to 256 by using an eight-bit byte. This IBM-extended ASCII set has become a de facto standard. However, the inability of US-ASCII to correctly represent many other languages became an obvious and intolerable misfeature as computer use outside the United States and United Kingdom increased. As a consequence, national extensions to US-ASCII were developed that were incompatible with one another. This in turn led to the standardization of 16-bit (or double-byte) and 32-byte character sets, such as Unicode, that could accommodate large numbers of linguistic and other symbols.
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Wikipedia search results for: ASCII
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text. Most modern character-encoding schemes, which support many more characters than did the original, are based on ASCII.
US-ASCII is the IANA preferred charset name for ASCII.
Historically, ASCII developed from telegraphic codes. Its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on ASCII formally began October 6, 1960, with the first meeting of the American Standards...more »
Columbia Encyclopedia search results: ASCII
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- Unicode
Unicode, set of codes used to represent letters, numbers, control characters, and the like, designed for use internationally in computers. It has been expanded to include such items as scienti...
- code, in communications
Code, in communications, set of symbols and rules for their manipulation by which the symbols can be made to carry information. By this extended definition all written and spoken languages are...
- computer
Computer, device capable of performing a series of arithmetic or logical operations. A computer is distinguished from a calculating machine, such as an electronic calculator, by being able to ...
