Background

• According to ASCII Table, computers can only understand numbers. The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was developed so characters such as equal signs and letters could have a numerical representation.
  
  

Definition

• PCMag defines ASCII protocol as the simplest communications protocol for text. The protocol uses ASCII control codes and only transmits ASCII characters.
  
  

Limitations

• ASCII codes are the basis for many character-encoding schemes used. To accommodate the ever-increasing number of characters, the code periodically will get extension sets of codes. ASCII protocol is also one of the file-transfer protocols to transfer data over networks. When used in this fashion, ASCII protocol cannot transfer numerical data in binary code.