ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
ASCII is a standard encoding system used to represent text characters in computer systems. Developed in the 1960s, ASCII assigns a unique 7-bit binary number to each character, allowing for the representation of up to 128 characters. These characters include uppercase and lowercase English letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control codes (e.g., newline and tab). ASCII was widely adopted because it provided a universal way to encode text across different systems, enabling interoperability. Although it has been largely replaced by more comprehensive encoding standards like Unicode, ASCII remains fundamental in programming, especially for basic text processing tasks.
Binary
Binary is the fundamental number system used by computers to store and process data. It is a base-2 numeral system, which
means it uses only two symbols: 0 and 1. Each digit in a binary number represents an increasing power of 2, starting from
the rightmost digit. Binary is efficient for computers because digital circuits can easily represent two states, such as
on/off or true/false, using 0 and 1. All forms of data, including text, images, and sound, are ultimately converted into
binary code for processing by computer hardware. For example, the binary number 101 represents
1 × 2² + 0 × 2¹ + 1 × 2⁰ = 5 in decimal form.