ASCII
In plain terms
A character encoding mapping text to numbers.
Going deeper
ASCII assigns numeric codes to English letters, digits, and symbols, an early standard for representing text in computers. It's the foundation of text encoding.
Under the hood
7-bit, 128 characters; limited to English, leading to Unicode for global scripts.
Examples
Text encoding, character codes, 'A'=65, plaintext, Unicode ancestor.
Think of it like...
Like an early alphabet codebook assigning a number to each basic character.