What is ASCII?

ASCII is an acronym, pronounced ask·ee, that stands for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange.  The original purpose of ASCII was to allow computers to convert numbers into printable characters, such as the letters of the words you're reading right now, and control simple actions provided by early computer terminals.  There are 128 ASCII characters, corresponding to 2⁷, of which 33 provide spacing and terminal control information such as the new-line and delete characters.  Originating from the predecessor of ANSI in the early 1960s, ASCII is one of the oldest computer standards still in use.  However, today most computers use the Unicode standard which contains ASCII as a subset of its most common character encoding, referred to as UTF-8.

• What does ANSI stand for?

• Standards