NIMCET 2013 — Computer PYQ

Solution

The standard ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard for electronic communication.

• Standard ASCII: It uses $7$ bits to represent each character. With $7$ bits, we can represent $2^7$ unique values, which equals $128$ characters (ranging from $0$ to $127$ in decimal). These include control characters, numbers, uppercase letters, lowercase letters, and punctuation marks.

  • Extended ASCII: Many modern systems use $8$ bits (one byte) to represent a character. While the first $128$ characters remain the same as standard ASCII, the additional $8^{th}$ bit allows for another $128$ characters (totaling $2^8=256$), often used for special symbols and non-English characters.

Since the question asks for the minimum number of bits required for the ASCII code set, the answer is $7$.