ASCII which known as American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character encoding based on the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that work with text… ASCII has been incorporated into the Unicode character set as the first 128 symbols.
Find out more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII

Unicode is an industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems. Unicode’s success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread and predominant use in the internationalization and localization of computer software. The standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including XML, the Java programming language, the Microsoft .NET Framework and modern operating systems.
Find out more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode

Tags: .NET, ASCII, computer, Java, Microsoft, text, Unicode, XML