What does ASCII stand for?

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This encoding standard was developed to facilitate the communication and representation of text in computers and other devices that use text. ASCII utilizes a set of 128 specified characters, which include control characters (like carriage return and line feed) and printable characters (such as letters, numbers, and punctuation marks).

The emphasis on "Information Interchange" in the name reflects the standard's purpose to provide a consistent way of encoding text that can be understood and processed across different types of computer systems and platforms. This universality is crucial in enabling data interchange between systems, which is particularly relevant in networking and data communication protocols.