Computer programmers developed coding systems to represent letters, numbers, and symbols with numeric codes. Three popular coding systems are EBCDIC, ASCII, and Unicode. EBCDIC used 6-bit codes and could represent 64 symbols, while ASCII is now most common and uses 8-bit codes for 256 symbols. Unicode is an evolving worldwide standard that uses 16-bit codes to represent over 65,000 symbols and characters from different languages.