ABSTRACT
When computers are used to swap documents, the data enclosed within them must be encoded in an efficient way. The most popular encoding method is ASCII - the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII code is built around the byte - an 8 bit storage unit - with 7 bits used and the eighth tending to be free or used for error-correcting. With 7 bits you can hold 128 values. This is enough for all the letters ofthe English language, both in upper and lower case, punctuation marks and numbers. In ASCII the first 31 codes are used to denote control codes such as start/end oftransmission, new line and so on. A space is 32, and the alphabet starts with the capital letters at 65, so 65 = A, 66 = B, etc.
