files/en-us/glossary/ascii/index.md
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a {{glossary("character encoding")}} standard using 7-bit to represent 128 {{glossary("character", "characters")}} used by computers and other devices for encoding letters, numbers, punctuation, and control codes into digital form.
The first 33 ASCII {{glossary("code point", "code points")}} are non-printing control codes including the carriage return, line feed, tab, and several obsolete non-printable codes stemming from its origin of representing telegraph codes. The other 95 are printable characters, including digits (0-9), lowercase (a-z) and uppercase (A-Z) letters, and punctuation symbols.
In the modern age, most computer systems use {{glossary("Unicode")}} instead, which is an extension of ASCII, supporting millions of code points. {{Glossary("UTF-8")}} superseded ASCII on the Web in 2007.