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American Standard Code for Information Interchange, an encoding system for converting keyboard characters and instructions into the binary number code that the computer understands.
American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), generally pronounced ask-ee [ˈæski] ([2]), is a character encoding based on the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that work with text. Most modern character encodings — which support many more characters — have a historical basis in ASCII.
Work on ASCII began in 1960. The first edition of the standard was published in 1963,[1] a major revision in 1967, and the most recent update in 1986. It currently defines codes for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing, mostly obsolete control characters that affect how text is processed, and 95 are printable characters.
