ASCII

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and it is a system of data processing in electronic form of communication. Constitutional in 1963 by the X3 committee of the American Standards Association (ASA), ASCII code allocates definite figures to all characters such as numeral, punctuation, and the alphabetic symbols. This coding helps in passing of data between two or more computers and standardizes selection of characters for textual data.

How Does ASCII Work?

ASCII is however a character encoding system, each character is represented by a number. The values are between from 0 to 255 in the decimal values, in the hexadecimal it is between 00 to FF. This coding system helps the computer to store information in a much better way and helps to transfer the information from one system to another.

The ASCII character set includes:

• Control Characters: These are the special characters that are not printable, but are used to manage the data flow, for instance, newline character or carriage return.
• Printable Characters: These include alphabets (both lower case and capital), numbers, punctuations and others symbols.

The Importance of ASCII

ASCII is one of the oldest and simplest text encoding schemes that have been used in the creation of computing and telecommunication systems. ASCII thus allowed for the selection of characters for textual data to be standardized thus enabling a common language that could be used by computers while at the same time ensuring that there was compatibility and consistency across different systems. This standardization was important in the early years of computing where various companies came up with their own encoding formats.

Global Acceptance of ASCII

ASCII has been adopted all over the world and implemented in the society as a standard for electronic information exchange. It has been able to maintain its usefulness even to this date due to the fact that it is simple and effective even when other more complicated encoding systems exist. First of all, ASCII’s clear connection to the framework of Software Engineering (SE) has allowed it to be a core component of programming, data management, and text modification.

Conclusion

ASCII is a very important coding scheme in the society today especially in the area of electronic communication as it provides a common way of encoding text that can be understood by any computer or other digital device. With the help of numerical representation of characters, ASCII makes it possible to encode the information in a consistent manner and to process it, which became the basis for modern computers and digital communication. These are some of the factors that make it one of the most important standards in the industry to this date even after being one of the first fundamental text standards.