Difference Between ANSI & ASCII

ANSI and ASCII are commonly encountered acronyms that have a shared heritage. One represents a standards organization and the other, a communication code set developed by that body.

ANSI

The American National Standards Institute is a non-governmental standards setting organization. The standards span a wide range of product, communication and process activities. Participation in the process and submission to the standards set are voluntary.

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange is an encoding standard for text based upon the English alphabet order. It is used in computing and communications for text representation. The alphabet in upper and lower case, punctuation and non-printing communication codes are all encoded using 8-bit combinations.

Common Heritage

ASCII encoding was developed by the American Standards Association starting in 1960. This independent organization later became a part of the ANSI organization.

International Equivalents

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is an international equivalent to the ANSI organization, setting standards that include more than American interests. Unicode is an encoding standard that includes characters and symbols beyond the English character set so that information exchange can occur beyond American limits.

References

• ANSI: Introduction
• University of Tennessee: ASCII