American Standard Code for Information Interchange’s acronym is ASCII. It is an official set of rules established by the American National Standards Institute to facilitate data transmission over telephone lines.
Ascii is an alphabet for representing English characters as numbers, assigning each letter an integer from 0 to 127 in binary form; these bits also make up text files we see online. Your computer translates these 0s and 1s into words, such as letters and numbers, by translating their long strings of 0s and 1s into alphabetic characters, such as letters, numbers, and symbols.
Ascii was created during the 1960s by a committee comprised of computer manufacturers, including IBM, DEC, and Honeywell. Based upon earlier telegraph codes which allowed different equipment manufacturers to communicate without conflict or misinterpretation between other makers’ machines, Ascii follows suit by being developed from this basis.
In 1963, American Standard Code for Information Interchange was first published as a standard for electronic communications and has become one of the most frequently utilized codes when representing English characters on computers.
Ascii code has been extended to support non-English characters such as accented letters by employing what is known as an extended Ascii code; however, its original form still dominates the online representation of English characters.
This code can also be used with other standards, including XML and C programming language.
Ascii characters are widely utilized in books and publishing; when creating files in Microsoft Word, for instance, characters you typed are stored using Ascii code which then gets translated to something your computer understands when saving the document.
Amazon converts books from Ascii code into something your Kindle can understand when purchasing from their store.