Fundamentals of Data Representation: Information coding schemes
| Another coding scheme called EBCDIC is used on IBM mainframes, but we don't need to know about it here |
So far we have seen the different ways that binary can be used to store numbers. As we already know, most computers can only understand binary and we often need to store alpha-numeric text (numbers, letters and other characters). To do this a computer will use a coding scheme. The most popular coding schemes are ASCII and Unicode. You'll need to know how each works and the benefits and drawbacks of using them.