What does ASCII stand for?

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This term reflects its purpose as a character encoding standard that facilitates the representation and exchange of text in computers and other devices that use text. ASCII was developed in the early 1960s and defines a set of 128 characters, including letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control characters, all of which correspond to specific numerical values that can be processed by computers.

This standardization allows for consistent communication and compatibility across different systems and platforms. ASCII encoding is fundamental in the computing field, as it laid the groundwork for other more complex encoding systems, such as UTF-8, which builds on ASCII but includes a wider array of characters to accommodate various languages and symbols. Understanding ASCII is essential for grasping how text data is represented, stored, and manipulated in the field of computing.