ascii

American Standard Code for Information Interchange

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), generally pronounced [æski], is a character encoding based on the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that work with text. Most modern character encodings — which support many more characters — have a historical basis in ASCII. ASCII was created in 1963, was first published as a standard in 1967 and was last updated in 1986. It currently defines codes for 128 characters. 33 are non-printing, mostly obsolete control characters that affect how text is processed and 95 are printable characters. taken from wikipedia.org