My coursework for (ISC 110)
Many people who live in this society, look at a keyboard on a computer and only think that those are the only keys that they have at their disposal. Keeping this in mind, this isn’t necessarily true. There are ways to place characters on a computer without it being on the keyboard. These characters are called ASCII characters.
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII are files that contain alphabetic, special and numerical characters that is displayed with a 7 bit binary system. With this, 128 characters are able to be displayed on the users screen. Extended ASCII will display characters up to 256. ASCII comes in three forms: Higher ASCII, Lower ASCII and Non-Printable. Higher ASCII are characters between 128 through 255. Lower ASCII are characters between 32 through 127 which are characters from the 7 bit system. Finally Non-Printable ASCII are codes embedded in the system of a computer.
Lastly, there are different ways to access ASCII characters on computers. On a PC, if you press ‘alt’ and then press any number let’s say 77 you will get the character ‘M’. On a Mac this will be the same character but you would have to press “alt” and “shift” then press 77 to receive the ASCII character ‘M’.