The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is a character encoding standard that represents text in computers and other digital devices. ASCII uses 7-bit binary numbers to encode 128 characters, including letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control characters. It is widely used in data transmission, programming, and text processing. ASCII was developed in the 1960s and became the most common character encoding system for computers, laying the foundation for later encoding standards like UTF-8. ASCII ensures compatibility across different devices and platforms, allowing for the seamless exchange of textual information in digital systems.