ASCII

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This standard was elaborated in the 1960s.

ASCII encodes the characters of the English alphabet to bits.

Originally it encoded 128 characters to 7 bits integers and later it encoded 256 characters to 8 bits.

This set of characters also includes punctuation, some international symbols and control characters that are non-printable and were used by the teletype machines.

The characters in the set are sorted alphabetically, so by using the character number you can sort word alphabetically.

For French or European characters another set of characters (charset) is used such as ISO-8859-1. All charsets are superseded by UTF-8 or UTF-16 which roughly contains all human characters.

Drawings are made using this simple charset. Those drawings were printed on paper or used on the terminal screens of later computers. Example of such drawings can be found at the ascii art archive.

The ascii art club is a tool generating ASCII art from images.

 _
//\
V  \
 \  \_
  \,'.`-.
   |\ `. `.       
   ( \  `. `-.                        _,.-:\
    \ \   `.  `-._             __..--' ,-';/
     \ `.   `-.   `-..___..---'   _.--' ,'/
      `. `.    `-._        __..--'    ,' /
        `. `-_     ``--..''       _.-' ,'
          `-_ `-.___        __,--'   ,'
             `-.__  `----"""    __.-'
hh                `--..____..--'
```