A Level Computer Science OCR Test 2025 – 400 Free Practice Questions to Pass the Exam

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.