ASCII

ASCII (ⁱ/ˈæski/ ASS-kee), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character-encoding scheme (the IANA prefers the name US-ASCII). ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text. Most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, though they support many additional characters. ASCII was the most common character encoding on the World Wide Web until December 2007, when it was surpassed by UTF-8, which includes ASCII as a subset.

ASCII developed from telegraphic codes. Its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on the ASCII standard began on October 6, 1960, with the first meeting of the American Standards Association's (ASA) X3.2 subcommittee. The first edition of the standard was published during 1963, underwent a major revision during 1967, and experienced its most recent update during 1986. Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting (i.e., alphabetization) of lists, and added features for devices other than teleprinters.

3568 ASCII

3568 ASCII is a small main belt asteroid discovered by Marguerite Laugier on October 17, 1936.

It was named (long after its discovery) in honor of the ASCII character encoding system that was used by most computers. The name was proposed by Syuichi Nakano, who re-discovered this asteroid during his stay at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory; a stay which was partially funded by articles he wrote for the principal Japanese microcomputer magazine, ASCII.

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Bell character

A bell code (sometimes bell character) is a device control code originally sent to ring a small electromechanical bell on tickers and other teleprinters and teletypewriters to alert operators at the other end of the line, often of an incoming message. Though tickers punched the bell codes into their tapes, printers generally do not print a character when the bell code is received. Bell codes are usually represented by the label "BEL". They have been used since 1870 (initially in Baudot code).

To maintain backward compatibility, video display terminals (VDTs) that replaced teletypewriters included speakers or buzzers to perform the same function, as did the personal computers that followed. Modern terminal emulators often integrate the warnings to the desktop environment (e.g., the Mac OS X Terminal will play the system warning sound) and also often offer a silent visual bell feature that flashes the terminal window briefly.

Representations

In ASCII and Unicode the character with the value 7 is BEL. It can be referred to as control-G or ^G in caret notation. Unicode also includes a character for the visual representation of the bell code, "symbol for bell" (␇) at U+2407.

Tab key

Tab ↹ Tab key (abbreviation of tabulator key or tabular key) on a keyboard is used to advance the cursor to the next tab stop.

History

The word tab derives from the word tabulate, which means "to arrange data in a tabular, or table, form." When a person wanted to type a table (of numbers or text) on a typewriter, there was a lot of time-consuming and repetitive use of the space bar and backspace key. To simplify this, a horizontal bar was placed in the mechanism with a moveable lever stop for every position across the page, called a tab stop. Initially these were set by hand, but later tab set and tab clear keys were added. When the tab key was depressed, the carriage advanced to the next tab stop. These were set to correspond to the particular column locations of the table, hence tab, being worked on.

The tab mechanism also came into its own as a rapid and consistent way of uniformly indenting the first line of each paragraph, often a first tab stop at 5 or 6 characters was used for this, far larger than the indentation used when typesetting.