The ABC

There are few things more important than the ABC. The alphabets. Starting from everything scarce and rare the alphabets we know are severely limited in numbers.

Traditional 7bit ASCII, or American Standard Code for Information Interchange,  has the potential to differentiate between 7^2 characters. It was only UNICODE in 90's that gave the non latin alphabet countries the possibility to display or print their own characters.

There you have it, it is called latin alphabet. The latin ABC as defined by the Internaltional Organization of  Standardization, ISO, has altogether 26 different alphabets in both majuscule and minuscule forms.

The alphabets do show us that sometimes the scarceness is not a problem. With the limited number of alphabets are still quite enough for all human correspondence and dialog, although we might need to add some special characters from the ASCII table to be able to reproduce human feelings: :-)

You may not wonder where this power of representation comes from, since this is something you are so used to, and then again, the explanation is actually really simple. It is kind of discrete math. You make an analog stream and convert it to characters. You use characters to represent phonetic segments. The next step is to convert the characters to bits by using the ASCII table and share the information with the rest of the world.