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.