US ASCII has always supported 128 characters which are the now the first 128 characters of UNICODE which itself now supports over 107,000 characters in various fonts. There were were other coding systems in the 70's and 80's namely extended ASCII and IBM's EBCDIC which both supported 256 characters. EBCDIC had its own version for each language so US EBCDIC was different from French language support EBCDIC which was different again from German etc. This made making PC emulators for talking to IBM mainframes and minicomputers entertaining as the PC used extended ASCII so getting the ASCII-EBCDIC and EBCDIC tables right was a challenge, not only for the screens but printers as well.
Margareta
2015-08-13 01:03:27 UTC
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RE:
How many characters ASCII and UNICODE support?
?
2010-07-25 04:38:33 UTC
ASCII - 128 characters
Unicode-107,000 characters
lassitc
2010-07-25 04:43:09 UTC
ASCII has 128 characters. The characters start with 0 (decimal) which is the null symbol and end with 127 (decimal) which is the “DEL” symbol or comand.
http://www.asciitable.com/ has more information on this.
UNICODE extends the character set to well over 107,000 characters and symbols.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters has more information on this.
-Charles
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