Representing Characters in a computer Pressing a key on the computer a code is generated that the computer can convert into a symbol for displaying or printing. Standards were required to make sure computers used the same codes for the characters. ASCII was set up – American Standard Code for information Interchange.

Representing Characters in a computer ASCII Represents: 127 Codes – requiring 7 bits 8 bit computers allowed an extra bit to store more mathematical characters Numerical values allow comparisons to sort data All the main alphabetic characters, upper and lower case52 Characters All the numeric symbols, Characters 32 punctuation and other symbols, and ‘space’33 Characters 32 codes reserved for non-printable control codes32 Characters

Representing Characters in a computer Unicode uses 32 bits allowing 4 billion possibilities – which includes multiple languages and characters. ASCII is a subset of Unicode.

Representing Characters in a computer Read page 78 – 79 Answer questions on page 79