Coding the information in digital computer systems and, more specifically, the text , requires an agreement that encompasses all the parties that exchange information to agree on how to represent it.
As information and communication technologies evolve in different places simultaneously, and receive contributions from all over the world, several information coding systems were born , more specifically letters, numbers and symbols, although due to the preponderance of the The United States in the technological field, which in the end won was ASCII, whose acronym stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange , and which consists of a seven-bit encoding for the alphabet, numbers and symbols common in English texts.
Since computer systems work with sets of eight bits (called bytes), what the inventors did was use the bit that was left over as parity to identify errors in the stored information.
The popularization of new technologies and the arrival of computing throughout the world, brought with it the need to represent information in languages other than English, which included characters not contemplated in the original ASCII code .
Thus, and in successive revisions, the ASCII code has been expanded, so that it currently supports up to 95 printable characters, along with 32 non-printable characters.
The non-printable characters correspond to control codes that were originally used to give instructions to devices such as printers (now not so common anymore) or screens, and that can be used by input devices such as keyboards.
By having lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers, and various symbols (such as brackets, parentheses, symbols of the four basic operations, period, ...), you are missing the necessary elements to support characters that use the same Latin alphabet as English (such as Spanish, French, Portuguese, or Italian), such as accented letters, ç or ñ.
To be able to work with these characters, an extension of the original ASCII is needed, which is often called US-ASCII, since it was born in the United States (US corresponds to United States ), which include the set of ASCII codes and characters in addition to other additions, being therefore compatible with ASCII encoded files, but the inverse relationship does not necessarily occur.
But where did the idea of creating a unified code come from with which to deal with information? Well, of necessity, but for its materialization, they were based on the codes used in telegraphy.
Today, all computers and software platforms use the ASCII code (or are capable of working with it) to receive, store , manipulate and share digital information.