An Acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
The ANSI X3.4 standard specifying a character set with 95 characters with codes ranging from 32 to 126 (0x20-0x7E). The first 31 codes have come to be known as control characters and are not specified by ASCII. Neither is any code beyond 126, since ASCII was designed strictly as a 7-bit encoding. It is by far the most successful and popular encoding ever conceived.
Many 8-bit encodings (such as ISO 646 and the wildly popular ISO 8859 tables) contain ASCII as their lower half.
See ascii(7).
21 pages link to ASCII:
