What is ASCII?

ASCII, the abbreviation of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a standard built-in-binary code for representing characters in most of the computers that can be displayed on the computer screen. It was only developed for communicat

What is ASCII?

What is ASCII?

     

ASCII, the abbreviation of  the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a  standard built-in-binary code for representing characters in most of the computers that can be displayed on the computer screen. It was only developed for communication and first adopted in 1963. The correct  pronunciation of  the ASCII  is "ASK-EE" with the hard sound of  C.

ASCII has been very popular in the computer world. It  contains seven bits to define each letter or character excluding eighth bit for error-checking function. There are 128 specific characters including capital letters, small letters, 0 to 9 digit, special symbols and some specific character having specific different functions.  Thirty-three codes  are used to represent things other than specific characters. The first 32 (0-31) codes represent a chime sound, used  to feed  line as well as to start of a header. The final code, 127 represents a backspace while the first 31 bits are the printable characters. Bits ranging from  48 to 57 represent the numeric digits and 65 to 90  represents the capital letters, while bits 97 to 122 are the lower-case letters. The rest bits represent symbols of punctuation, mathematical symbols, and other symbols such as the pipe and tilde.

Earlier ASCII was developed  only in six bits for a simpler character set. But  finally it has been reconstructed using seven bits for assimilating   lower-case letters, punctuation, and control character sets  to enhance its utility. No other than English characters  has been used in ASCII. ASCII is not used in IBM computers. IBM has its own built-in-code called EBCDIC code containing 256 character sets. Nowadays Unicode character set is replacing ASCII code very rapidly. ASCII is being famous in ASCII art phase that describes the use of the basic character set to create visual approximations of images.