What is ASCII? - A Brief History and Overview of the Standard

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard that was developed in the United States in the early 1960s. It is a 7-bit character encoding that assigns unique binary codes to each character, ranging from 0 to 127.

ASCII was developed to provide a common character encoding standard for computers and communication systems, which at the time were using a variety of different encoding schemes. The standard was developed by a committee of industry experts, and it was first published in 1963.

ASCII includes a set of 95 printable characters, which include the letters of the English alphabet, the digits 0 to 9, and various punctuation marks and control characters. It also includes 32 non-printing characters, such as the null character (which represents the end of a string), the line feed and carriage return characters (which are used to move the cursor on a screen), and the bell character (which is used to produce a beep sound).

ASCII has been widely adopted and is still widely used today, despite the fact that it is a relatively simple encoding scheme compared to more modern encodings like Unicode. It remains an important part of many computer systems and networks, and it is often used as a fallback encoding when other encodings are not available or are not supported.