ASCII & EBCDIC

ASCII  

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is an encoding standard that represents digits, letters, and symbols using numbers. The digits can be 1, 2, 3, etc. while the letters are a, b, c, A, B, C, etc. The symbols are characters like !, $, and #. Therefore, it is possible to convert any piece of text to the corresponding set of numbers using ASCII. This conversion makes it easier to store them in the computer memory. 

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is the most common character encoding format for text data in computers and on the internet. In standard ASCII-encoded data, there are unique values for 128 alphabetic, numeric or special additional characters and control codes.

ASCII encoding is based on character encoding used for telegraph data. The American National Standards Institute first published it as a standard for computing in 1963.

 

EBCDIC

EBCDIC stands for Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code. It is mainly used on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems. It is also supported by some platforms other than IBM. EBCDIC uses 8 bits to represent a single character, and it represents a 256 (2⁸) alphanumeric and special characters. There are several disadvantages to EBCDIC. When compared to ASCII, the same character which takes 7 bits to represent in ASCII will take 8 bits in EBCDIC. Therefore, EBCDIC is less efficient than ASCII.