Season Two Research Files
Episode Eight
3:00pm-4:00pm
ASCII CODE
ASCII, pronounced "ask-key," stands for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is the most common format for text files in computers and on the Internet. Since computers can only understand numbers, in an ASCII file, each alphabetic, numeric, or special character is represented with a binary number (a string of seven 0s or 1s) from 0 to 127. Most computers use ASCII codes to represent text, which makes it possible to achieve compatibility and transfer data from one computer to another. The Extended ASCII Character Set also consists of 128 decimal numbers, and ranges from 128 through 255 representing additional special, mathematical, graphic, and foreign characters.
Born at the dawn of the modern computer age, ASCII was developed by the American National Standards Institute between 1963-68. Other sources also credit much of the work on ASCII to work done in 1965 by Robert W. Bemer. While it is still the basis of character sets used in almost all present-day computers (such as Unix and DOS-based operating systems), Windows NT and 2000 use a newer code called Unicode. IBM's S/390 systems use a proprietary 8-bit code called EBDIC. Conversion programs allow different operating systems to change a file from one code to another.
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