The Function And Purpose Of The Ascii And Extended Ascii Code

ASCII is the representation of Binary Digits (0 & 1s) which are interpreted by Processor as meaningful data.

The ASCII code 128 unique character ( 2 power 7 ). This was enough to represent all the (American and Britain English) characters in the keyboard. Here characters includes Alphabets, numbers, speical characters, symbols and Shift,ctrl,alt, tab (Non-Printable characters).

Other than American and British English, some other foreign languages occupied the space in the computer world. For ex, Korean, Japanesh. These languages extensively used more characters and symbols. Inorder to accompany all those letters/characters, the American Standard Institute enchanced the above ASCII code with one more bit. ie 2 power 8. So its now support 256 Unique characters.

This is sufficient to represent all the characters in the all the countries languages. So this broadened ASCII is called Extended-Ascii.