Civilization / Humanities & Culture

ASCII (Standard Computer Text Code)

In 1963 American engineers agreed on one 7-bit code for 128 letters, digits and control signals, so that computers and printers from different makers could finally exchange text.

Before 1963 manufacturers used more than sixty different character codes, so machines could not read each other's text. Bob Bemer of IBM proposed a common code in 1961, and a committee of the American Standards Association, led by John Auwaerter of Teletype, published ASCII in 1963 on the basis of telegraph and teleprinter codes. It has 128 codes, 95 printable characters and 33 control codes; in 1991 it became the first 128 characters of Unicode, and it is still the base of plain text in e-mail and web pages.