A Level Computer Science OCR Practice Exam

Which character set was created in 1963 for early telecommunications?

1. Unicode

2. ISO/IEC 8859

3. ASCII

4. UTF-16

The correct answer is: ASCII

The character set created in 1963 for early telecommunications is indeed ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII was designed as a standard way to represent characters, including letters, numbers, and a variety of symbols, in digital communication. This was particularly important in the context of telecommunications, as it ensured that different devices and systems could communicate effectively using a consistent encoding. ASCII uses a 7-bit binary code to represent a total of 128 characters, making it one of the simplest and most widely used character sets. It played a crucial role in the development of computer systems and remains foundational to many more complex character encoding systems today. The other options were developed later: Unicode is designed to encompass a vast array of characters and symbols from multiple languages, ISO/IEC 8859 is a standard also developed later for various Latin alphabets, and UTF-16 is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode.