7-bit ascii

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7-bit ascii

7-bit ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard that represents characters using 7 bits, allowing for a total of 128 possible characters. This standard is widely used for electronic communication and text processing.

What does 7-bit ascii mean?

7-bit ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a Character Encoding standard that represents 128 characters using 7 bits or 1 byte of data. Each character is represented by a unique binary code, providing a common method for computers and electronic devices to exchange and display text information.

7-bit ASCII includes the English alphabet (uppercase and lowercase), numbers, punctuation marks, some special characters, and control codes. It is a subset of the 8-bit ASCII standard, which adds an additional 128 characters, including accented characters, symbols, and other language-specific characters.

Applications

7-bit ASCII is widely used in technology today due to its simplicity, compatibility, and support for basic text operations. It is commonly employed in:

  • Web browsing: The internet relies heavily on 7-bit ASCII for text display in web browsers.
  • Email communication: Both text-only and HTML-formatted emails use 7-bit ASCII as the default character encoding.
  • Text editing: Basic text editors and word processors primarily use 7-bit ASCII to encode text files.
  • Data Storage: Text-based data in databases, file systems, and other storage systems is often stored in 7-bit ASCII.
  • Network communication: Legacy protocols like Telnet and FTP use 7-bit ASCII for character transmission.
  • Terminal emulation: Virtual terminals and emulators employ 7-bit ASCII for text display.

History

7-bit ASCII evolved from the earlier 5-bit Baudot code used in telegraphy. In 1963, the American Standards Association (ASA) developed the ASCII standard based on the 7-bit Fieldata code, which was primarily used in Punched tape applications.

ASCII was initially adopted by the United States Information Industry Association (USITA) and later became an international standard under the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It has since undergone several revisions to include additional characters and accommodate different languages.

7-bit ASCII remains an important standard for text encoding due to its widespread adoption and backward compatibility. However, Unicode, which supports a much wider range of characters, including those from non-Latin-based languages, has become increasingly prevalent in recent years.