Unicode vs ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) launched in 1963 is used to translate human strings example ‘abcABC’ from their English characters to numbers that computers can read since computer can only read zeroes and ones (binary). The range is 0-127 so 128 English characters.

Unicode - builds upon ASCII since 128 characters is limiting so Unicode includes other non English symbols such as ∆ + 💁 and Emoji + lets not forgot Chinese characters. There are more than 1.40.000 characters represented in Unicode. Unicode has various flavors such as UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, etc. With UTF-8 used in over 90% of websites + most operating systems. The first 128 Unicode characters point to the ASCII characters to provide backward compatibility.