Which of the following codes has gained the widest acceptance for exchange of data from one computer to another?

The selection of ASCII as the most widely accepted code for exchanging data between computers is rooted in its historical significance and enduring utility. ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, was developed in the early 1960s and became a foundational character encoding standard that enables text data to be represented in a way that can be understood uniformly across different computer systems.

ASCII uses a 7-bit binary number to represent characters, which includes control characters and printable characters such as letters, digits, and punctuation. Its simplicity and efficiency made it highly conducive to early computer communication and data transfer, leading to widespread adoption across different platforms and systems.

While UTF-8 is increasingly used due to its capability of encoding a vast range of characters from numerous languages and scripts, ASCII remains relevant as the basic subset of UTF-8 and for many applications that focus on English text. This historical and functional significance helps maintain ASCII's status as a foundational standard for data exchange.

ISO 8859-1 offers an extended character set for Western European languages, and EBCDIC is a character encoding used primarily on IBM mainframes, but neither has achieved the same level of universal acceptance as ASCII.