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| 1 | +There are many ways to represent information on a computer. All methods involve defining a relationship between the information and some numbers that will be used to represent it. Computers, after all, only understand numbers and all data is converted to numeric representation. |
| 2 | + |
| 3 | +Some of these representation systems are very complex (such as compressed image files), while others are rather simple. One of the earliest and simplest is called ASCII text. ASCII (pronounced "As-Key") is short for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This is a simple encoding scheme that was first used on Teletype machines to map keyboard characters to numbers. |
| 4 | + |
| 5 | +Text is a simple one-to-one mapping of characters to numbers. It is very compact. Fifty characters of text translates to fifty bytes of data. Throughout a Linux system, many files are stored in text format and there are many Linux tools that work with text files. Even the legacy operating systems recognize the importance of this format. The well-known NOTEPAD.EXE program is an editor for plain ASCII text files. |
| 6 | +There are many ways to represent information on a computer. All methods involve defining a relationship between the information and some numbers that will be used to represent it. Computers, after all, only understand numbers and all data is converted to numeric representation. |
| 7 | + |
| 8 | +Some of these representation systems are very complex (such as compressed image files), while others are rather simple. One of the earliest and simplest is called ASCII text. ASCII (pronounced "As-Key") is short for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This is a simple encoding scheme that was first used on Teletype machines to map keyboard characters to numbers. |
| 9 | + |
| 10 | +Text is a simple one-to-one mapping of characters to numbers. It is very compact. Fifty characters of text translates to fifty bytes of data. Throughout a Linux system, many files are stored in text format and there are many Linux tools that work with text files. Even the legacy operating systems recognize the importance of this format. The well-known NOTEPAD.EXE program is an editor for plain ASCII text files. |
| 11 | +There are many ways to represent information on a computer. All methods involve defining a relationship between the information and some numbers that will be used to represent it. Computers, after all, only understand numbers and all data is converted to numeric representation. |
| 12 | + |
| 13 | +Some of these representation systems are very complex (such as compressed image files), while others are rather simple. One of the earliest and simplest is called ASCII text. ASCII (pronounced "As-Key") is short for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This is a simple encoding scheme that was first used on Teletype machines to map keyboard characters to numbers. |
| 14 | + |
| 15 | +Text is a simple one-to-one mapping of characters to numbers. It is very compact. Fifty characters of text translates to fifty bytes of data. Throughout a Linux system, many files are stored in text format and there are many Linux tools that work with text files. Even the legacy operating systems recognize the importance of this format. The well-known NOTEPAD.EXE program is an editor for plain ASCII text files. |
| 16 | +There are many ways to represent information on a computer. All methods involve defining a relationship between the information and some numbers that will be used to represent it. Computers, after all, only understand numbers and all data is converted to numeric representation. |
| 17 | + |
| 18 | +Some of these representation systems are very complex (such as compressed image files), while others are rather simple. One of the earliest and simplest is called ASCII text. ASCII (pronounced "As-Key") is short for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This is a simple encoding scheme that was first used on Teletype machines to map keyboard characters to numbers. |
| 19 | + |
| 20 | +Text is a simple one-to-one mapping of characters to numbers. It is very compact. Fifty characters of text translates to fifty bytes of data. Throughout a Linux system, many files are stored in text format and there are many Linux tools that work with text files. Even the legacy operating systems recognize the importance of this format. The well-known NOTEPAD.EXE program is an editor for plain ASCII text files. |
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