The ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)> is a standard seven-bit code that was proposed by ANSI (American National Standards Institute) in 1963, and finalized in 1968. Other sources also credit much of the work on ASCII to work done in 1965 by Robert W. Bemer. ASCII was established to achieve compatibility between various types of data processing equipment. ASCII, pronounced "ask-key", is the common code for microcomputer equipment. The standard ASCII character set consists of 128 decimal numbers ranging from zero through 127 assigned to letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and the most common special characters (see ASCII Table).
EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) characters are 8 bits long, and were originally used by IBM on their mainframe computers.
The following table shows ASCII and EBCDIC character code values along with their decimal, octal, and hexadecimal equivalents.