The American Standards Association (ASA, now known as ANSI for “American National Standards Institute”) approved the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) back in 1963. This set out binding specification for how electronic devices should represent characters. Since the standard is US-American, it is often referred to as US ASCII.
Its predecessors include Morse code and the codes used in telexes, where a standardized code (e.g. a fixed sequence of acoustic signals) is translated into text. Since computers cannot handle our alphabet, because their internal processes are based on the binary system, ASCII was introduced.
To this day, the standard has rarely been changed to adapt to new requirements. For example, extended versions exist that use an eighth bit so that national peculiarities such as the German umlauts (ä, ö and ü) can be represented. Latin-1 (ISO 88591-1), which is still popular in Germany, is based on the ASCII code.
However, it is still not possible to switch between the Latin alphabet and, for example, Arabic characters. To this end character sets based largely on Unicode, such as UTF-8, are now well-established. Unicode provides space for more than a million different characters. UTF-8 is also compatible with ASCII, encoding the first 128 characters in the same way.