what is character encoding about?
The need for electronic character encoding first arose when people tried to send messages via telegraph lines using, for example, the Morse code3. The Morse code encodes alphabets and other characters, like major punctuation marks, as dots and dashes, which respectively represent short and long electrical signals. While telegraphs already existed when the Morse code was invented, the earlier telegraph relied on varying voltages sent via a telegraph line to represent various characters. The earlier approach was basically different from the Morse code in that with this former approach the line is always “on” whereas with the latter, the line is sometimes “on” and sometimes “off”. The binary “on” and “off” signals are what, at the lowest level, modern computers use (i.e. 0 and 1) to encode characters. As such, the Morse code is considered here as the beginning of character encoding. Note, however, that character encoding in the Morse code is also different from how modern computers encode
