A

application A software program designed to assist in the performance of a specific task, such as word processing, accounting or inventory management API Acronym for Application Programming Interface. ASCII ASCII was developed in 1968 to standardize data transmission among disparate hardware and software systems and is built into most minicomputers and personal computers. ASCII is an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a coding scheme using 7 or 8 bits that assigns numeric values to up to 256 characters, including letters, numerals, punctuation marks, control characters and other symbols. ASCII file A document file in ASCII format, containing characters, spaces, punctuation, carriage returns, tabs and an end-of-file marker, but no formatting information. Can also be called a text file or text-only file.