What does "ASCII" stand for?

ASCII stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange." This is a character encoding standard that was developed in the early 1960s. It assigns numeric values to letters, digits, and other symbols, allowing computers and devices to communicate with each other by representing text in a format that can be easily processed and understood. The importance of ASCII lies in its role as a foundational text encoding scheme, enabling consistent representation of characters across different platforms and devices.

Unlike the other choices, which present variations that don't align with the widely recognized definition of ASCII, the correct answer accurately reflects both the scope and the origin of this standardized code. As such, it is critical in computing and digital communication.