Computers represent a text character as a string of bits. A string of n bits gives 2n different combinations since each of the n bits can be set to 0 or 1. Microcomputers mostly represent text characters using ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) which was developed by ANSI (American National Standards Institute). IBM (International Business Machines corporation) mainframes and minicomputers mostly use the EBCDIC (Extended Binary-Coded Decimal Interchange Code) which was developed by IBM. |