#CS250#Information#Computer-Science

Early Character Representation

  • First instance of bit string representing text - Baudot Code (1870)
    • Used for Morse Code
    • 5 bits per character, so characters
    • Character encodings chosen to put less strain on users
  • In 1901, Donald Murray modifies it
    • Introduces Carriage Return and Line Feed characters
    • Now we can have multiple lines!

ASCII Character Representation

  • 1963 American Standard Code for Information Interchange
  • 7 bit code, 128 characters
  • Adds digits, both letter cases and control characters
  • Character encoding is redesigned for machine oriented criteria rather than human oriented criteria
    • Makes sorting text by machine easier
    • Alphabetic order = integer order of characters
    • Changing case only requires changing one bit
      • Upper and lower cases intentionally differ by 0x20

Unicode

  • Unicode Consortium manages unicode
  • Made by Xerox and Apple
  • Up to 4 bytes per character
  • Version 14.0 as of September 2021
    • 144,697 characters
  • Has other language characters and emoji! :)