American Standard Code for Information Interchange
Used to encode letters and numbers in digital form for electronic storage and processing. Originally binary numbers with seven digits (seven bits) were used, which made it possible to represent a total of 128 characters. The use of 8-bit numbers was later introduced, increasing the total to 256 characters. Unicode notation based on 16-bit numbers has been gaining increasing acceptance in recent years. It can be used to represent 65,536 different characters.