TL;DR

Every computer is still using ASCII codes. Here is a brief history of ASCII codes. The post is aligned with the Black Box Software Testing Foundations course (BBST) designed by Rebecca Fiedler, Cem Kaner, and James Bach.

ASCII stands for American Standard Code For Information Interchange. At that time, the device for information interchange was a teletype. So ASCII represents encodings for teletype 128 codes. The famous one is the BELL code, which rings the teletype bell! BELL code is 7. For 128 codes, we need 8 binary digits, a BYTE.

Every programming language supports ASCII, for example, in Ruby, you can find out about character ASCII code by using ord method:

2.6.5 :002 > “a”.ord

=> 97