The American Standard Code for Information Interchange, commonly known as ASCII, is a character encoding standard used for representing text in computers and other devices that use text. 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 to represent 128 characters, which includes the English alphabet, numbers 0-9, and various symbols. This standard has been foundational in computer programming and data communication, influencing later encoding systems like UTF-8 that support a wider range of characters.