Data and binary
Text as numbers
To a computer every letter is a number. Agreements such as ASCII and Unicode say which number belongs to which character.
Prior knowledge
Why
A computer only knows numbers. So how can it store your name, or a message with a smiley?
Everyone has to make the same agreement: A is 65, B is 66, and so on. Then a computer in Ghent can send a message that a computer in Tokyo reads correctly.
Such an agreement is called an encoding. The best-known old one is called ASCII, the big modern one is called Unicode.
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