ASCII
ASCII, American Standards Code for Information Interchange, is the standard code for information interchange among data processing systems, data communication systems, and associated devices. The code uses a character set consisting of 7 bit coded characters (8 bits including parity check). The ASCII set consists of control characters and graphic characters. Since the number of characters is limited to 128, several special characters used in non-English languages (e.g. ä, ö, ü etc.) are not part of the character set. ASCII was originally published in 1963 by the American National Standards Institute and last updated in 1986.
