Research Topics:

Quantitative Research

Industry/Market Focus:

Consumers

Content Type:

Glossary

American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) Definition

A code for transmission of data from one database to another.

American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII, is a character encoding standard used in computers and other communication devices to represent text and control characters. ASCII assigns a unique numerical value (between 0 and 127) to each letter, number, punctuation mark and special symbols. This standard allows computers to exchange and interpret textual information uniformly. ASCII is used because of its simplicity, universality and historical significance. It was one of the first widely adopted character encoding standards. And, it provides a common ground for computers to exchange textual data. The standardization of ASCII ensured compatibility across different platforms and devices and contributed to the growth of computer networks and the internet. Although newer character encodings like UTF-8 and UTF-16 can represent a wider range of characters, ASCII's influence on the development of modern computing cannot be overstated. It laid the groundwork for more complex character encoding standards and remains a fundamental building block of digital communication.

Who relies on ASCII?

After its development in the early 1960s, ASCII was widely adopted in the computing industry. It was the foundation of character encoding for early computers and communication systems. Almost all programming languages, operating systems and network protocols used ASCII for representing and transmitting text.

Why should I care about ASCII?

Comprehending ASCII’s role in computing and its role in the industry is important in understanding how characters are represented and encoded in various systems. ASCII  became crucial for handling data conversions, file formats and network communication, especially when dealing with older systems or interacting with low-level protocols. Even though modern systems primarily use Unicode to support a broader range of characters, ASCII's foundation remains relevant in computing knowledge.