Which Mocro Computers use The ASCII Code?

Question

For my I.T H.W I'ms supposed to find which Micro computer uses the ASCII code. She said that MOST !, use the EBDIC, but a few uses the ASCII

Answer 1

I don’t believe that ANY microcomputer has EVER used EBCDIC.



EBCDIC was an encoding, actually several encodings, used for IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computers and systems such as Unisys which seek compatibility with them. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC . Microcomputers traditionally ALL used a version of ASCII, including the original IBM PC, first issued in 1981.



Either you have grossly misunderstood your teacher or she should be fired for abysmal and unbelievable ignorance.



Most micro computers these days use Unicode (see http://www.unicode.org/charts/ ). The first 128 characters of Unicode correspond to ASCII in UTF-8 encoding of Unicode. That is they have identical numeric values to the ASCII values in that encoding. UTF-8 is the most popular encoding for web use and is used on most operating systems internally, but the Microsoft operating system uses UTF-16 internally. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16 .



All computers that support Unicode can also support ASCII. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII for the history of ASCII encoding.

Answer 2

"MOST !, use the EBDIC" is incorrect.  EBCDIC was used almost exclusively with IBM mainframe and minicomputers, and is considered obsolete.  Multilingual EBCDIC or UTF-EBCDIC, for example, has never been supported natively on IBM mainframes, and no form of EBCDIC was available on IBM PCs.



Programs and operating systems such as those sourced by Oracle must retain EBCDIC for backward compatibility with IBM-generated databases and documents.



The vast majority of operating systems from the sixties onward are ASCII-based, including all versions of Windows.  Even computers such as the Atari 800 and successors used ASCII in their programming and user intefaces, despite having a different internal coding scheme.

Answer 3

I wish to ask the same question as the op.