Understanding ASCII and Unicode

Your computer has no idea what the letter 'A' is. To your machine, 'A' is just the

number 65. This is because of an old system called ASCII, which assigned a

unique number to every English character. But this created a problem: it couldn't handle other languages

or emojis. That’s why we now use Unicode. It uses double the memory,

but it gives a unique code to literally every character and symbol from every language in

the world. That simple text you send is actually a stream of numbers being converted

back into letters on your friend's screen.