December 14, 2020
ASCII
Simple text encoding on 7 bits (per character).
American Standard Code for Information Interchange
The first encoding that came to the mind of computer scientists was the following: decide for a corresponding number to each letter.
The English alphabet is composed of 26 letters, that are declined into lowercase and uppercase letters; which makes 52 different symbols. If we can add to this the 10 digits plus different symbols, such as $ or punctuation symbols, we reach 127 characters.
Knowing that the bigger the number, the more space it takes in a computer memory; they wanted to limit the space taken by each character in memory so they decided that this encoding was sufficient to encode English texts. Each symbol corresponds to a single number, as shown below
