Today, the encoding scheme named has arisen to take over for ascii for many applications.

Today, the encoding scheme named unicode has arisen to take over for ascii for many applications.
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems.The Unicode standard defines UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, and several other encodings are in use. 
UTF-8 is the most  widely used. This enciding standard is variable-length and uses 8-bit code units.

The five major components is processor main memory second memory and input devices and output devices