History of ASCII

	Revision 36 . . November 27, 2001 6:54 am by Lee Daniel Crocker ["Third bit" is ambiguous, and anyway assumes 8-bit bytes, while ASCII is a 8-bit code.]
	Revision 35 . . November 25, 2001 9:54 am by Bryan Derksen [captialization trick]
	Revision 34 . . November 25, 2001 9:45 am by Bryan Derksen [better table]
	Revision 33 . . November 25, 2001 9:45 am by Bryan Derksen
	Revision 32 . . November 25, 2001 9:44 am by Bryan Derksen [better table]
	Revision 31 . . November 2, 2001 6:28 am by Hajhouse [clarify claim that ASCII is universal]

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Difference (from prior major revision) (no other diffs)

Changed: 79c79,80

The first thirty-two codes (numbers 0--31) in ASCII are reserved for control characters: codes that may not themselves represent information, but that are used to control devices (such as printers) that make use of ASCII. For example, character 10 represents the "line feed" function (which causes a printer to advance its paper), and character 27 represents the "escape" key found on the top left of common keyboards. Note how capital case characters can be converted to lower case by adding 32 to their ASCII value; in binary, this can be accomplished simply by flipping the third bit of each byte.

The first thirty-two codes (numbers 0--31) in ASCII are reserved for control characters: codes that may not themselves represent information, but that are used to control devices (such as printers) that make use of ASCII. For example, character 10 represents the "line feed" function (which causes a printer to advance its paper), and character 27 represents the "escape" key found on the top left of common keyboards. Note how uppercase characters can be converted to lowercase by adding 32 to their ASCII value; in binary, this can be accomplished simply by setting the sixth-least significant bit to 1.