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ASCII

Computers do not use the alphabet, they save and use information that has been converted to numbers.

ASCII stands for 'American Standard Code for Information Interchange'. It is a table of all the characters that American electric type-writers used. Each character was given a number.

When you hit A key on your keyboard, the keyboard sends the number 65 to your computer. This then shows on you computer as A.

Before ASCII, computers would still assign numbers to characters but they would all be very different numbers. A might be number 65, 1, or 43 depending on who made your computer. Then when you emailed someone who used a different number table, they could not read your message. The letters were all jumbled or missing completely.

ASCII was a standard, a way of doing things that everyone in America agreed to follow. That way when an email was sent others could read it.

This is a very small list of characters, people from around the world who use computers need a much larger range of symbols. Even in countries that use the latin alphabet, there was no way to show accents or macrons like ā, ē, ī on a computer. We now use unicode which has a much bigger list of numbers matched to symbols.