In the early 1960s, computers had no way of communicating with each other due to different ways of representing keys of the keyboard. Hence, the need for a common standard was realised to overcome this shortcoming. Thus, encoding scheme ASCII was developed for standardising the character representation. ASCII is still the most commonly used coding scheme.
Initially ASCII used 7 bits to represent characters. Recall that there are only 2 binary digits (0 or 1). Therefore, total number of different characters on the English keyboard that can be encoded by 7-bit ASCII code is 27 = 128. Table shows some printable characters for ASCII code. But ASCII is able to encode character set of English language only.
ASCII code for some printable characters
