ASCIIteckenuppsättningen

ASCIIteckenuppsättningen, often referred to simply as ASCII, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. Developed in the early 1960s, it was originally designed for telegraphic communication and later became the standard for early computing. The name ASCII is an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.

The original ASCII standard uses seven bits to represent characters, allowing for 128 unique characters. These characters include the uppercase and lowercase letters of the English alphabet, digits 0-9, punctuation marks, and control characters. Control characters were used for tasks such as line feed, carriage return, and tab.

As computing evolved, the need for more characters became apparent, leading to the development of extended ASCII sets. These extended versions typically use eight bits, providing 256 possible characters. Extended ASCII introduced additional symbols, accented letters, and graphic characters, though these extended sets were not standardized and varied between different systems and manufacturers.

Despite the advent of newer, more comprehensive character encoding standards like Unicode, ASCII remains foundational. Many modern encoding systems, including UTF-8, are backward compatible with ASCII, meaning that ASCII characters are represented identically within these systems. This compatibility ensures that legacy data and systems can still be processed and understood. ASCII's enduring influence highlights its significance in the history of computing and digital communication.