Glossary / ASCII
Term: ASCII
ASCII is a 7-bit character set consisting of 128 different letters, numbers or punctuation symbols (the 8th bit is used as parity bit).
In ASCII, every character has a corresponding number, or ASCII code.
For example, the character for the number 7 has the code 55, capital letter C has the code 67, and a blank space has the code 32.
The ASCII encoding system lets a computer store a document as a series of numbers and allows it share those documents with other computers that use the ASCII system.
Extended ASCII
An 8-bit character set consisting of 256 characters.