The first edition of the standard was published in 1963, underwent a major revision during 1967, and experienced its most recent update during 1986. Work on the ASCII standard began in May 1961, with the first meeting of the American Standards Association's (ASA) (now the American National Standards Institute or ANSI) X3.2 subcommittee. Its first commercial use was as a seven- bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) prefers the name US-ASCII for this character encoding. Many computer systems instead use Unicode, which has millions of code points, but the first 128 of these are the same as the ASCII set. Because of technical limitations of computer systems at the time it was invented, ASCII has just 128 code points, of which only 95 are printable characters, which severely limited its scope. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. ASCII ( / ˈ æ s k iː/ ( listen) ASS-kee), : 6 abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication.
