ASCII
ASCII (Lˈæski/ ass-kee), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange,[1] is a character-encoding scheme. Originally based on the English alphabet, it encodes 128 specified characters into 7-bit binary integers as shown by the ASCII chart on the right.[2] The characters encoded are numbers 0 to 9, lowercase letters a to z, uppercase letters A to Z, basic punctuation symbols, control codes that originated with Teletype machines, and a space. For example, lowercase j would become binary 1101010 and decimal 106.
ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text. Most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, though they support many additional characters.
ASCII developed from telegraphic codes. Its first commercial use was as a 7-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on the ASCII standard began on October 6, 1960, with the first meeting of the American Standards Association's (ASA) X3.2 subcommittee. The first edition of the standard was published during 1963,[3][4] a major revision during 1967,[5] and the most recent update during 1986.[6] Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting (i.e., alphabetization) of lists, and added features for devices other than teleprinters.
ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing control characters (many now obsolete)[7] that affect how text and space are processed[8] and 95 printable characters, including the space (which is considered an invisible graphic[9][10]:223).
The IANA prefers the name US-ASCII.[11] ASCII was the most common character encoding on the World Wide Web until December 2007, when it was surpassed by UTF-8, which includes ASCII as a subset.
History
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was developed under the auspices of a committee of the American Standards Association, called the X3 committee, by its X3.2 (later X3L2) subcommittee, and later by that subcommittee's X3.2.4 working group. The ASA became the United States of America Standards Institute or USASI[10]:211 and ultimately the American National Standards Institute.
Bit width
The X3.2 subcommittee designed ASCII based on the earlier teleprinter encoding systems. Like other character encodings, ASCII specifies a correspondence between digital bit patterns and character symbols (i.e. graphemes and control characters). This allows digital devices to communicate with each other and to process, store, and communicate character-oriented information such as written language. Before ASCII was developed, the encodings in use included 26 alphabetic characters, 10 numerical digits, and from 11 to 25 special graphic symbols. To include all these, and control characters compatible with the Comité Consultatif International Téléphonique et Télégraphique (CCITT) International Telegraph Alphabet No. 2 (ITA2) standard, Fieldata, and early EBCDIC, more than 64 codes were required for ASCII.
The committee debated the possibility of a shift function (like in ITA2), which would allow more than 64 codes to be represented by a six-bit code. In a shifted code, some character codes determine choices between options for the following character codes. It allows compact encoding, but is less reliable for data transmission; an error in transmitting the shift code typically makes a long part of the transmission unreadable. The standards committee decided against shifting, and so ASCII required at least a seven-bit code.[10]:215, 236 § 4
The committee considered an eight-bit code, since eight bits (octets) would allow two four-bit patterns to efficiently encode two digits with binary-coded decimal. However, it would require all data transmission to send eight bits when seven could suffice. The committee voted to use a seven-bit code to minimize costs associated with data transmission. Since perforated tape at the time could record eight bits in one position, it also allowed for a parity bit for error checking if desired.[10]:217, 236 § 5 Eight-bit machines (with octets as the native data type) that did not use parity checking typically set the eighth bit to 0.[15]
Organization
The code itself was patterned so that most control codes were together, and all graphic codes were together, for ease of identification. The first two columns (32 positions) were reserved for control characters.[10]:220, 236 § 8,9) The "space" character had to come before graphics to make sorting easier, so it became position 20hex;[10]:237 § 10 for the same reason, many special signs commonly used as separators were placed before digits. The committee decided it was important to support upper case 64-character alphabets, and chose to pattern ASCII so it could be reduced easily to a usable 64-character set of graphic codes,[10]:228, 237 § 14 as was done in the DEC SIXBIT code. Lower case letters were therefore not interleaved with upper case. To keep options available for lower case letters and other graphics, the special and numeric codes were arranged before the letters, and the letter A was placed in position 41hex to match the draft of the corresponding British standard.[10]:238 § 18 The digits 0–9 were arranged so they correspond to values in binary prefixed with 011, making conversion with binary-coded decimal straightforward.
Many of the non-alphanumeric characters were positioned to correspond to their shifted position on typewriters; an important subtlety is that these were based on mechanical typewriters, not electric typewriters.[16] Mechanical typewriters followed the standard set by the Remington No. 2 (1878), the first typewriter with a shift key, and the shifted values of 23456789- were "#$%_&'() – early typewriters omitted 0 and 1, using O (capital letter o) and l (lowercase letter L) instead, but 1! and 0) pairs became standard once 0 and 1 became common. Thus, in ASCII !"#$% were placed in second column, rows 1–5, corresponding to the digits 1–5 in the adjacent column. The parentheses could not correspond to 9 and 0, however, because the place corresponding to 0 was taken by the space character. This was accommodated by removing _ (underscore) from 6 and shifting the remaining characters left; this corresponded to many European typewriters, which placed the parentheses with 8 and 9. This discrepancy from typewriters led to bit-paired keyboards, notably the Teletype Model 33, which used the left-shifted layout corresponding to ASCII, not to traditional mechanical typewriters. Electric typewriters, notably the more recently introduced IBM Selectric (1961), used a somewhat different layout that has become standard on computers—​following the IBM PC (1981), especially Model M (1984)—​and thus shift values for symbols on modern keyboards do not correspond as closely to the ASCII table as earlier keyboards did. The /? pair also dates to the No. 2, and the ,< .> pairs were used on some keyboards (others, including the No. 2, did not shift , (comma) or . (full stop) so they could be used in uppercase without unshifting). However, ASCII split the ;: pair (dating to No. 2), and rearranged mathematical symbols (varied conventions, commonly -* =+) to :* ;+ -=.
Some common characters were not included, notably ½¼¢, while ^`~ were included as diacritics for international use, and <> for mathematical use, together with the simple line characters \| (in addition to common /). The @ symbol was not used in continental Europe and the committee expected it would be replaced by an accented À in the French variation, so the @ was placed in position 40hex, right before the letter A.[10]:243
The control codes felt essential for data transmission were the start of message (SOM), end of address (EOA), end of message (EOM), end of transmission (EOT), "who are you?" (WRU), "are you?" (RU), a reserved device control (DC0), synchronous idle (SYNC), and acknowledge (ACK). These were positioned to maximize the Hamming distance between their bit patterns.[10]:243–5
Publication
With the other special characters and control codes filled in, ASCII was published as ASA X3.4-1963, leaving 28 code positions without any assigned meaning, reserved for future standardization, and one unassigned control code.[10]:66, 245 There was some debate at the time whether there should be more control characters rather than the lower case alphabet.[10]:435 The indecision did not last long: during May 1963 the CCITT Working Party on the New Telegraph Alphabet proposed to assign lower case characters to columns 6 and 7,[17] and International Organization for Standardization TC 97 SC 2 voted during October to incorporate the change into its draft standard.[18] The X3.2.4 task group voted its approval for the change to ASCII at its May 1963 meeting.[19] Locating the lowercase letters in columns 6 and 7 caused the characters to differ in bit pattern from the upper case by a single bit, which simplified case-insensitive character matching and the construction of keyboards and printers.
The X3 committee made other changes, including other new characters (the brace and vertical bar characters),[20] renaming some control characters (SOM became start of header (SOH)) and moving or removing others (RU was removed).[10]:247–248 ASCII was subsequently updated as USASI X3.4-1967, then USASI X3.4-1968, ANSI X3.4-1977, and finally, ANSI X3.4-1986 (the first two are occasionally retronamed ANSI X3.4-1967, and ANSI X3.4-1968).
The X3 committee also addressed how ASCII should be transmitted (least significant bit first), and how it should be recorded on perforated tape. They proposed a 9-track standard for magnetic tape, and attempted to deal with some forms of punched card formats.
Use
ASCII itself was first used commercially during 1963 as a seven-bit teleprinter code for American Telephone & Telegraph's TWX (TeletypeWrit...
"Compensatory Behaviour"
20 Dec '14 23:39
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