Data Representation Schemes

Question 1

American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)

Answer 1

ASCII was developed in 1963. ASCII is a seven-bit code that can represent 128 different characters (from seven zeroes to seven ones). Each letter and symbol is assigned a number between 0 and 127. With 128 values, it can easily represent the entire English alphabet, the numerals 0 through 9, and the most common punctuation marks.

Question 2

Unicode

Answer 2

In 1992, a group called the Unicode Consortium released the first version of Unicode. Unicode uses 16-bit encoding and is capable of representing millions of different text characters. It has enough space for every character from every human language, with room to spare.