Stands for American Standard Code for Information Inter-change and is pronounced askey.
This is a numerical code used to represent characters. For example, A is 65 and B is 66. ASCII is used by almost all computers, software and comms systems, allowing different computers to exchange data. ASCII is not completely standardised. The first 128 characters are well defined and normally adhered to and cover letters, numbers and simple controls such as Delete. The characters between 128 and the limit of ASCII, 255, are far from standard.