Full form of ASCII?
VerifiedAnswer: American Standard Code for Information Interchange
Explanation:
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It's a character encoding standard that was developed in the early 1960s to provide a standardized way for computers and electronic devices to represent text characters using numbers.
Think of ASCII as a universal translator between humans and computers. When you type the letter 'A' on your keyboard, the computer doesn't understand what 'A' means. However, ASCII assigns a unique number to each character - in this case, the number 65 represents the uppercase letter 'A'. This way, computers can store, process, and display text by working with these numerical codes.
ASCII originally used a 7-bit system, which means it could represent 128 different characters (2^7 = 128). These characters include:
• Uppercase letters (A-Z): codes 65-90
• Lowercase letters (a-z): codes 97-122
• Digits (0-9): codes 48-57
• Special characters and punctuation marks
• Control characters (like tab, newline, and carriage return)
The beauty of ASCII lies in its simplicity and universality. Before ASCII, different computer manufacturers used their own character encoding systems, making it difficult to share text files between different systems. ASCII solved this problem by providing a common standard that all computers could follow.
For example, when you send a text message or email, ASCII ensures that the letter 'M' you type appears as 'M' on the recipient's device, regardless of whether they're using a Windows computer, Mac, or smartphone. This standardization was crucial for the development of the internet and modern digital communication.
While ASCII was groundbreaking in its time, it had limitations. Since it was developed in America, it only included characters commonly used in English. It couldn't represent characters from other languages like Chinese, Arabic, or even accented letters used in European languages. This limitation led to the development of more comprehensive encoding systems like Unicode, which can represent characters from virtually all world languages.
Today, ASCII remains the foundation of modern character encoding. Even advanced systems like Unicode maintain backward compatibility with ASCII, meaning the first 128 characters in Unicode are identical to ASCII characters. This ensures that older text files and systems continue to work seamlessly with newer technology.
