|
Table Sets
American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), generally pronounced ask-ee IPA: /ˈæski/ (), is a character encoding based on the English alphabet. more...
Home
Bedding
Furniture
Bedroom Furniture
Children's Furniture
Dining Room Furniture
Kitchen Furniture
Living Room, General...
Bean Bags, Inflatables
Benches
Bookcases
CD, Video Racks
Chairs
Armchairs, Club Chairs
Barcelona Chairs
Folding Chairs
Lounge Chairs
Other Chairs
Recliners
Rocking Chairs, Gliders
Theater Seating
Chests, Cabinets
Entertainment Ctrs, TV...
Futons, Futon Covers
Futon Covers
Futon Frames
Futons
Other Futons, Futon Covers
Occasional Tables
Card & Game Tables
Coffee Tables
Console, Sofa Tables
End Tables
Other Tables
Table Sets
Tray Tables
Other Furniture
Ottomans, Footstools
Sofas, Loveseats
Loveseats
Other
Sectionals
Sets
Sofa Beds, Sleeper Sofas
Sofas
Trunks
Office
Home Decor
Miscellaneous
Patio & Grilling
ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that work with text. Most modern character encodings — which support many more characters than did the original — have a historical basis in ASCII.
Work on ASCII began in 1960. The first edition of the standard was published in 1963, a major revision in 1967, and the most recent update in 1986. It currently defines codes for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing, mostly obsolete control characters that affect how text is processed, and 95 are printable characters.
Overview
Like other character representation computer codes, ASCII specifies a correspondence between digital bit patterns and the glyphs (i.e., symbols) of a written language. This allows digital devices to communicate with each other and to process, store, and communicate character-oriented information. The ASCII character encoding—or a compatible extension (see below)—is used on nearly all common computers, especially personal computers and workstations. The preferred MIME name for this encoding is "US-ASCII".
Except for a few of the ASCII control characters that prescribe some elementary line-oriented formatting, ASCII does not define any mechanism for describing the structure or appearance of text within a document. Other schemes, such as markup languages, address page and document layout and formatting.
ASCII is, strictly, a seven-bit code, meaning it uses patterns of seven binary digits (a range of 0 to 127 decimal) to represent each character. When ASCII was introduced, many computers used eight-bit bytes (groups of bits), called octets, as the smallest unit of information. In seven-bit ASCII encoding, the eighth bit was commonly used as a parity bit for error checking on communication lines or for other device-specific functions. Machines that did not use parity checking typically set the eighth bit to 0.
The American National Standards Institute (then called the United States of America Standards Institute or USASI) developed ASCII based on earlier teleprinter encoding systems. Circa 1956, Ivan Idelson, at Ferranti in the UK, had proposed the Cluff-Foster-Idelson coding of characters on 7 track paper tape to a British Standards committee. This eventually becomes ASCII. ASCII itself first entered commercial use in 1963 as a seven-bit teleprinter code for American Telephone & Telegraph's TWX (Teletype Wide-area eXchange) network. TWX originally used the earlier five-bit Baudot code, which was also used by the competing Telex teleprinter system. The Bell System had planned to upgrade to a six-bit code derived from the Fieldata project, which added punctuation and lower-case letters to the Baudot code, but was persuaded instead to join the American Standards Association (part of ANSI) subcommittee that had started to develop ASCII. Compared with earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII both underwent re-ordering for more convenient sorting (especially alphabetization) of lists, and added features for devices other than teleprinters. Bob Bemer introduced features such as the escape sequence. His British colleague Hugh McGregor Ross helped to popularize this work—according to Bemer, "so much so that the code that was to become ASCII was first called the Bemer-Ross Code in Europe".
Read more at Wikipedia.org
|
|