ASCII, or American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard used to represent text in computers and other devices. It assigns a unique number to each character, including letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control characters, allowing for consistent data exchange between different systems. Originally developed in the 1960s, ASCII uses a 7-bit binary number system, which means it can represent 128 different characters. This standard has been widely adopted and serves as the foundation for many other encoding systems, such as UTF-8, which extends the character set to accommodate a broader range of symbols and languages.