American Standard Code for Information Interchange is the abbreviation for ASCII.
It is a character encoding which is a standard for all computers.
Basically what this means is that many of characters, ranging from numeric, alphabetical (lower case and upper case), arithmetic symbols, special symbols, punctuation symbols and several others can be represented by a standard code.
ASCII was developed from telegraph code.
ASCII’s first edition was introduced in 1963. It underwent several updates since then.