1. This is the defacto world-wide standard for the code numbers used by computers to represent all the upper and lower-case Latin letters, numbers, punctuation, etc. There are 128 standard ASCII codes each of which can be represented by a 7 digit binary number: 0000000 through 1111111. From Matisse

2. a standard code used for representing information on computer systems and networks. It uses the printing and non-printing characters that can be generated by the keyboard. Since 7 bits are available to represent each character it is possible to represent a total of 128 different characters. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux