Alphanumeric

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Alphanumeric is a collective term used to identify letters of the Roman Alphabet and Roman Numbers. There are either 36 (single case) or 62 (case-sensitive) alphanumeric characters. The alphanumeric character set consists of the numbers 0 to 9 and letters A to Z.

[edit] Computing

In computing terminology, a character stored in alphanumeric form is considerable smaller than storing a 8-bit ASCII character, as each character is only 6-bits in length.

There is no standard for storing 6-bit alphanumeric data, and since a 6-bit character has up to 64 combinations, and only 36 are used in single case, there is room for another 28 characters, usually slashes and other punctuation making alphanumeric data useful for storing text and website addresses.

Alphanumeric data can be stored even smaller in computer systems if the storage medium is calculated in base 36, where each numerical position represents a character. Storing characters in base 36 and base 64 (6-bits per character) is much more memory efficient for storing text-only data than storing data in base 256 (8-bits, or a byte).

[edit] Other references

In the TV show ReBoot, alphanumeric was a phrase used by Enzo as an equivalent of "cool!" or "awesome!" In the musical in the third season, it was used to mean "everything is all right."