1963
ASCII standard published
The American National Standards Institute adopted ASCIIAmerican Standard Code for Information Interchange — a character encoding mapping letters and symbols to numbers. as ANSI X3.4-1963 — a 7-bit character encoding for information interchange.
What it was for
ASCIIAmerican Standard Code for Information Interchange — a character encoding mapping letters and symbols to numbers. gave computers a shared alphabet for text files, terminals, and protocols. Every later encoding — including UTF-8A variable-width Unicode encoding — the default text format for the web, JSON, and most modern software. — builds on or maps through ASCIIAmerican Standard Code for Information Interchange — a character encoding mapping letters and symbols to numbers.'s 128 code points, making it the invisible layer beneath email, HTTPHyperText Transfer Protocol — the protocol browsers use to request and receive web pages., JSONJavaScript Object Notation — a lightweight text format for structured data exchange on the web., and source code.
Why it's here
ASCIIAmerican Standard Code for Information Interchange — a character encoding mapping letters and symbols to numbers. became the universal text layer for hardware and software from the 1960s onward.
Why it mattered
A single character set let programs and networks exchange plain text without vendor-specific codes.
What it solved
Each manufacturer used incompatible teletypeA keyboard-printer terminal that sent and received text over wires — early way to interact with distant computers. and punch-card character sets.
Media
- ImageASCII character table
ZZT32 / Yufeng Huang, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Related
- Rob Pike and Ken Thompson design UTF-8September 1992
- JavaScript standardizedJune 1997