Used since the beginning of computing, ASCII (American Standard Code
for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit coded character set for
information interchange in English. It was published in 1968 by ANSI
(American National Standards Institute), with an update in 1977 and
1986. The 7-bit plain ASCII, also called Plain Vanilla ASCII, is a set
of 128 characters with 95 printable unaccented characters (A-Z, a-z,
numbers, punctuation and basic symbols), the ones that are available on
the English / American keyboard. With the use of other European
languages, extensions of ASCII (also called ISO-8859 or ISO-Latin) were
created as sets of 256 characters to add accented characters as found
in French, Spanish and German, for example ISO 8859-1 (ISO-Latin-1) for
French.