ASCII

ASCII is he acronym which corresponds to the English expression American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This phrase can be translated as American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It's about a encoding pattern that is used in the field of computing.

The ASCII is basically a character code which is based on the Roman or Latin alphabet. This means that the ASCII serves to convert, through a series of rules, a character that is part of a natural language (such as a letter of a alphabet) in a symbol that belongs to another class of representative system.

The creation of ASCII It was produced in 1963 from the reformulation of the codes that were used in the telegraphy. Four years later, lowercase letters were added and certain codes.

The American company of telecommunications known as AT&T, of international popularity, at that time it was called Bell, and provided the data services that powered the ASCII code. Initially, Bell had planned to use only six bits, but after joining the American Standards Agency, whose acronym was HANDLE, this changed and the 7th bit was added.

For character representation, the ASCII uses 7 bits. The code allows you to define 32 characters that are not printable, followed by 95 printable characters. As it is a code of 7 bits, appeals to bit strings 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 bit of parity, used to be used to control errors in communication lines, although it could also be used for other functions, depending on the device in question.

In general, computers that did not use such checking mistakes they assigned a zero to this bit; however, the series Prime computers, among others, placed a one in the eighth bit. It is important to note that the ASCII code does not take into account data such as the appearance or the structure of the text, since for all this there are certain specific languages, such as of labelsInstead, it focuses on characters and some control codes that word processors take advantage of.

Specifically, the ASCII maps these strings to the symbols they represent (such as letters and numbers). This makes it easier to store and process information in a computer (computer) and communication between different digital devices.

The use of a particular character code is extremely useful to avoid the loss of information as a consequence of the incompatibility between different programs; In other words, if we know what code a document is based on. text, 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 issues specific to the world of technology, advanced users use software that does allow them to change this and many other aspects of their documents, although many times they must perform certain extra steps to accommodate the applications to their needs.

It is known as ASCII art to artistic manifestations that use this code to create images. When developing drawings with the ASCII characters, the artists achieve a very particular optical effect.