American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), AS kee, is a code that computers use to process letters, numbers, and other character data. Each character corresponds to a seven-digit binary number. The binary number system contains only 1's and 0's. Computers process data in binary form. Computers use ASCII and other character codes to translate binary data into characters familiar to human beings. For example, the binary number 1000011 in ASCII means C; 1110010 means r.