file extension ASCII

File extension ASCII description:

The ASCII file extension is used for text files. American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that work with text. Most modern character-encoding schemes which support many more characters than did the original have a historical basis in ASCII.

Historically, ASCII developed from telegraphic codes. Its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on ASCII formally began October 6, 1960, with the first meeting of the American Standards Association's (ASA) X3.2 subcommittee. The first edition of the standard was published in 1963, a major revision in 1967, and the most recent update in 1986. Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting (i.e., alphabetization) of lists, and added features for devices other than teleprinter.

ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing control characters (now mostly obsolete) that affect how text is processed; 94 are printable characters, and the space is considered an invisible graphic. The most commonly used character encoding on the World Wide Web was US-ASCII until 2008, when it was surpassed by UTF-8.