American Standard Core for Information Interchange (Ascii)
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII for short, is a computer code that uses 128 different encoding combinations of a group of seven bits, or pieces of information, to represent a number of alphanumeric features. These include the characters A to Z (both upper and lower case), special characters, such as < and ?, the numbers 0 to 9, and special control codes for control of the device. ASCII characters can utilize parity.
ASCII allows the creation of text files. Unlike the characters in word processing documents, however, ASCII does not allow special formatting, such as the use of different fonts, bold, underlined or italic text. All the characters used in email messages were originally ASCII characters--formatting bold and italic characters involve hypertext markup language (HTML). Additionally, because email characters are ASCII, graphics files, and documents with non-ASCII characters created in word processors, spreadsheets, or database programs must be sent as email attachments. When the files reach their destination, they are decoded and reconstructed to their original format.
ASCII was created in 1963. At about the same time, the IBM Corporation created and promoted the use of a coding standard known as Extended Binary-Coded-Decimal Exchange Code (EBCDEC). This is an 8-bit code that allows up to 256 characters. Over the next several years, ASCII emerged as the preferred system, and it became a United States government standard in 1968. In that year, ASCII was defined by the American National Standards Institute as ANSI Standard x3.4.
The ASCII keyboard, which relates the codes to the specified feature, is arranged numerically on the vertical axis (00, 10, 20...70) and alphanumerically on the horizontal axis (00, 01, 02...09, 0A, 0B...0F). Each code is arranged with the vertical axis position first followed by the horizontal axis position. As an example, 40 and 08, or 48, represents H. As another example, 20 and 0A, or 2A, represents *. On an ASCII keyboard 'Hello.' would be coded as follows:
H = 48
e = 65
l = 6C
l = 6C
o = 2E
. = 2E
An ASCII file is a data or text file that contains characters coded from the standard ASCII character set. Characters 0 through 127 comprise the Standard ASCII Set, and characters 128 to 255 are considered to be in the Extended ASCII Set. These codes are not necessarily the same in all computers--PCs and Mactinosh computers utilize ASCII, while larger IMB continue to utilize the EBCDEC. Most data files, particularly if they contain numeric data, are not stored in ASCII format, and executable programs, or that data which is critical to the commencement of a function, are never stored in ASCII format.
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