was originally created with a 7 bit system using 128 characters
ASCII
title: 8-bit clean text: 8-bit clean 8-bit clean describes a computer system that correctly handles 8-bit character encodings, such as the ISO 8859 series and the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode. Up to the early 1990s, many programs and data transmission channels assumed that all characters would be represented as numbers between 0 and 127 (7 bits); for example, the ASCII standard used only 7 bits per character, avoiding an 8-bit representation in order to save on data transmission costs. On computers and data links using 8-bit bytes this left the top bit of each byte free for use as a parity, flag bit, or title: Character encoding text: six-bit encoding scheme used by IBM in as early as 1959 in its 1401 and 1620 computers, and in its 7000 Series (for example, 704, 7040, 709 and 7090 computers), as well as in associated peripherals. BCD extended existing simple four-bit numeric encoding to include alphabetic and special characters, mapping it easily to punch-card encoding which was already in widespread use. It was the precursor to EBCDIC. For the most part, IBMs codes were used primarily with IBM equipment, which was more or less a closed ecosystem, and did not see much adoption outside of IBM "circles". IBM's Extended Binary title: ASCII text: the English alphabet, ASCII encodes 128 specified characters into seven-bit integers as shown by the ASCII chart above. Ninety-five of the encoded characters are printable: these include the digits "0" to "9", lowercase letters "a" to "z", uppercase letters "A" to "Z", and punctuation symbols. In addition, the original ASCII specification included 33 non-printing control codes which originated with Teletype machines; most of these are now obsolete, although a few are still commonly used, such as the carriage return, line feed and tab codes. For example, lowercase "i" would be represented in the ASCII encoding by binary 1101001 = hexadecimal title: Character encoding text: "baudot" has been erroneously applied to ITA2 and its many variants. ITA2 suffered from many shortcomings and was often "improved" by many equipment manufacturers, sometimes creating compatibility issues. In 1959 the U.S. military defined its Fieldata code, a six-or seven-bit code, introduced by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. While Fieldata addressed many of the then-modern issues (eg. letter and digit codes arranged for machine collation), Fieldata fell short of it's goals and was short-lived. In 1963 the first ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) code was released (X3.4-1963) by the ASCII committee (which contained at least one member of title: Control character text: 127 (DEL, a.k.a. "rubout") is likewise a special case. Its 7-bit code is "all-bits-on" in binary, which essentially erased a character cell on a paper tape when overpunched. Paper tape was a common storage medium when ASCII was developed, with a computing history dating back to WWII code breaking equipment at Biuro Szyfrów. Paper tape became obsolete in the 1970s, so this clever aspect of ASCII rarely saw any use after that. Some systems (such as the original Apples) converted it to a backspace. But because its code is in the range occupied by other printable characters, and because it