What is the Difference Between ASCII and EBCDIC?
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), also known as ANSI X3.4, and the Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) are computer character encoding sets. Although there are a number of variants of ASCII, all of them are essentially the same and the ASCII encoding system is often praised by computer scientists for its simplicity and adaptability. EBCDIC is considered an anachronism in the computer world as it was designed for the now superannuated punch cards of the nineteenth century. ASCII, on the other hand, was developed in the nineteen sixties and is very much designed for use in the world of modern computing. Both ASCII and EBCDIC were based on the Baudot code – a nineteenth century alternative Morse code – but they were designed for different purposes and to different ends. Essentially a seven-bit code, ASCII allows the eighth most significant bit (MSB) for error checking, but most contemporary computer systems use the ASCII codes above 128 fo
