This document discusses character encoding systems used to represent textual data in computing. It describes several character encoding standards including ASCII, EBCDIC, ISO 646, ISO 885, and UTF-16. ASCII is a 7-bit encoding that can represent 128 characters and was limited as it does not support languages with large character sets. EBCDIC is an 8-bit encoding mainly used on IBM mainframe computers. UTF-16 is a 16-bit Unicode encoding that can represent over 65,000 characters and supports representation of text in many languages.