ASCII is the acronym corresponding to the English expression "American Standard Code for Information Interchange."
ASCII is the acronym that corresponds to the English expression American Standard Code for Information Interchange . This phrase can be translated as American Standard Code for Information Exchange . It is a coding pattern that is used in the field of computing.
ASCII is, basically, a character code that is based on the Roman or Latin alphabet. This means that ASCII is used to convert, through a series of rules, a character that is part of a natural language (such as a letter of an alphabet ) into a symbol that belongs to another kind of representative system.
Origin of ASCII
The creation of ASCII occurred in 1963 from the reformulation of the codes used in telegraphy . Four years later, lowercase letters were added and certain codes were changed.
The internationally popular American telecommunications company known as AT&T , at the time called Bell , provided the data services that powered the ASCII code. Bell originally planned to use only six bits, but after joining the American Standards Agency, whose acronym was ASA , this changed and the seventh bit was added.
ASCII is a coding pattern used in the field of computing.
Main features
For character representation, ASCII uses 7 bits . The code allows you to define 32 non-printable characters, followed by 95 printable characters. As it is a 7- bit code, it uses strings of bits that can be represented with seven binary digits, which in decimal base are between 0 and 127.
When ASCII code first appeared, the most common was the use of groups of eight bits in computers as the smallest possible unit of information; The last bit, which was known as the parity bit , was usually used to control errors on communication lines, although it could also be used for other functions, depending on the device in question.
Computers that did not use such error checking typically assigned a zero to this bit; However, the Prime series of computers, among others, placed a one in the eighth bit. It is important to highlight that the ASCII code does not take into account data such as the appearance or structure of the text, since for all this there are certain specific languages, such as labels , but rather it focuses on the characters and some control codes that They take advantage of word processors.
ASCII and information
Specifically, ASCII establishes a correspondence between these strings and the symbols they represent (such as letters and numbers). This makes it easier to store and process information on a computer and communicate between different digital devices.
The use of a particular character code is extremely useful to avoid the loss of information as a result of incompatibility between different programs; In other words, if we know what code a text document is based on, we can always interpret it. Of course, this happens automatically for most users, since the operating system and word processors do not highlight the importance of encoding or provide accessible options for manipulating it.
As with most specific topics in the world of technology, advanced users use software that does allow them to change this and many other aspects of their documents , although they often must take certain extra steps to adapt the applications to their needs. .
Artistic manifestations that use this code to create images are known as ASCII art . By developing drawings with ASCII characters , artists achieve a very particular optical effect.