ASCII

Computers don't speak English or any other human language. Deep down in the operating system heart, they speak a language comprised of 0s and 1s, or bits. While the first computer programmers wrote their programs in bits, someone determined that it would be easier to have the computer convert human language into bits rather than do the conversion manually. To allow humans to type, a code was developed to convert human letters into 0s and 1s that the computer could understand.

ASCII is a 7-bit character set where each character is defined by 0s and 1s. Every letter in English, and most Romance language (like French or Italian) characters are represented by an ASCII code. For example, the letter A is ASCII code 65. When you write in a text editor, the letters you type are converted to ASCII before they are sent to the computer processor.