The GB 2312 standard was published by the China State Bureau of Standards in 1980. GB stands for national standard. It contains 6,763 Chinese characters: 3,755 in level 1 and 3,008 in level 2.
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GB 2312 covers about 99.75% of the characters used in mainland China, which was enough for most computer processing of Chinese.
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It cannot cover rare characters used in personal names and classical Chinese. That led to GBK and GB 18030.
GB 2312 also includes 682 full-width characters, including Latin letters, Greek letters, Japanese hiragana and katakana, and Cyrillic letters.
GB 2312 is compatible with ASCII (0-127). Every graphic character after that uses two bytes, and both the high byte and the low byte are greater than 127.
The GB 2312 character set is divided into 94 sections, with 94 positions in each section. The section and the position correspond to the first and second bytes. This is also called a location code.
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Sections 01-09: special symbols
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Sections 10-15: user-defined symbols (not encoded)
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Sections 16-55: level-1 Chinese characters, ordered by pinyin, 3,755 characters
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Sections 56-87: level-2 Chinese characters, ordered by radical and stroke count, 3,008 characters
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Sections 88-94: user-defined Chinese characters (not encoded)
