ASCII

The ASCII code stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange". Here, a unique binary digit sequence is assigned for each character, which makes it possible to exchange the text between different systems. The 7-bit numeric code includes just that normal alphabet (A-Z, a-z, numbers and some special characters) that`s a total of 128 characters. Special characters, such as umlauts, the "ß" and other national special characters are included but not taken into account. IBM extended the ASCII code to 8 bits (numbers from 0 to 256). This can be used to display additional special characters and block graphic characters.