ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Interchange
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a method to define a set of characters for encoding text documents on computers. This codes represent computers and other communication devices that use text. It was the most common computer encoding on the World Wide Web until December 2007, after that it surpassed by UTF-8 which uses this as a subset.
History
It was first adopted in 1963. In short time, it became very popular and widely used in computer world. It was first commercially used as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services.
It is originally based on the English alphabet. It encodes 128 specified characters into seven bit binary integer. Initially it was 6 bit character set but later it has become 7 bit character set.
Usage
Most of the computers use thus code to represent texts. It makes possible to transfer data from one computer to another computer. The ASCII text files are used in DOS and UNIX based operating systems. Text editors and word processors are capable to store data in this format but it is not a default storage format.
Future of ASCII
The ASCII texts are not the best character encoding sets. So currently, it is being replaced by Unicode character sets. Only DOS and UNIX based operating systems are using ASCII while Windows OS is using new Unicode.
