Editing Code page (section)

=== Relationship to ASCII ===
The majority of code pages in current use are supersets of [[ASCII]], a 7-bit code representing 128 control codes and printable characters. In the distant past, 8-bit implementations of the ASCII code set the top bit to zero or used it as a [[parity bit]] in network data transmissions. When the top bit was made available for representing character data, a total of 256 characters and control codes could be represented. Most vendors (including IBM) used this extended range to encode characters used by various languages and graphical elements that allowed the imitation of primitive graphics on text-only output devices. No formal standard existed for these "extended ASCII character sets" and vendors referred to the variants as code pages, as IBM had always done for variants of EBCDIC encodings.