Today's episode of BaseCS explores a very special number in computing: 256!

In this episode, we explore encoding schemes, which afford us a more human-friendly way of representing data as compared to binary. We learn about the ASCII encoding scheme, and how many bits the basic ASCII table requires to represent a character. Then, we'll learn how the ASCII table was extended to make use of an entire byte's worth of data! Finally, we'll see how one single bit can be super powerful, and why the number 256 is tied so closely to one byte of data.

This whole series is sponsored by Heroku. A special thank you to Heroku for their ongoing support!

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