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UTF-8 history (2003)

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Re: UTF-8 history (2003)

#21

Post by toast0 »

nostrademons wrote: post #11
anonymars wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"UTF-8 was first officially presented at the USENIX conference in San Diego, from January 25 to 29, 1993" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 ) Hey team, we're working to release an ambitious new operating system in about 6 months, but I've decided we should burn the midnight oil to rip out and redo all of the text handling we worked on to replace it with something that was just introduced at a conference.. Oh and…

Interestingly, there is another story on the HN front page about Steve Wozniak doing exactly that for the Apple I: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45265240

The 6502 and the 6800 are pretty similar. The 6501 was pin compatible with the 6800, but not software compatible; the 6501 was dropped as part of a settlement with Motorola.

Changing an in-progress system design to a similar chip that was much less expensive ($25 at the convention vs $175 for a 6800, dropped to $69 the month after the convention) is a leap of faith, but the difference in cost is obvious justification, and the Apple I had no legacy to work with.

It would have been great if Windows NT could have picked up utf-8, but it's a bigger leap and the benefit wasn't as clear; variable width code points are painful in a lot of ways, and 16-bits for a code point seemed like it would be enough for anybody.

Re: UTF-8 history (2003)

#22

Post by edflsafoiewq »

anonymars wrote: post #8
flohofwoe wrote: post #3

WinNT missing out on UTF-8 and instead going with UCS-2 for their UNICODE text encoding might have been "the other" billion dollar mistake in the history of computing ;) There was a 9 month time window between the invention of UTF-8 and the first release of WinNT (Sep 1992 to Jul 1993). But ok fine, UTF-8 didn't really become popular until the web became popular. But then missing the other opportunity to make the tra…

"UTF-8 was first officially presented at the USENIX conference in San Diego, from January 25 to 29, 1993" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 ) Hey team, we're working to release an ambitious new operating system in about 6 months, but I've decided we should burn the midnight oil to rip out and redo all of the text handling we worked on to replace it with something that was just introduced at a conference.. Oh and…

My takeaway from this story has always been that both MS and Plan 9 simply passively implemented Unicode as received. It was only IBM that had the vision to see that the encoding was wrong and they should make a new one.

Re: UTF-8 history (2003)

#23

Post by inglor_cz »

bikeshaving wrote: post #6

There are socio-economic reasons why the early computing boom (ENIAC, UNIVAC, IBM mainframes, early programming languages like Fortran and COBOL) was dominated by the US: massive wartime R&D, university infrastructure, and a large domestic market. But I wonder if the Anglophone world also had an orthographic advantage as well. English uses 26 letters with no diacritics, compared to other languages like Chinese (thous…

There must be some alternate universe where WWII never happened, all the talented Hungarian and Polish mathematicians, logicians etc. stayed home, and computer parts and applications carry names like Emlékezet or Wrzeszcz.

Re: UTF-8 history (2003)

#24

Post by pklausler »

duskwuff wrote: post #19
pklausler wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We got lots done with 6-bit pre-ASCII encodings, actually, like CDC Display Code and Univac's Fieldata. It's more than enough for 26 letters, 10 digits, and lots of punctuation. And there are faint echoes of these early character sets remaining in ASCII -- a zero byte is ^@, for example, because @ was the zero-valued Fieldata "master space" character, which distinguished EXEC 8 control cards from source code and data…

> a zero byte is ^@, for example, because... A zero byte is ^@ because 0x00 + 64 = '@'. The same pattern holds for all C0 control codes.

Yes, and why is '@' at 0x40?

Re: UTF-8 history (2003)

#25

Post by Pet_Ant »

kps wrote: post #15
bikeshaving wrote: post #6

There are socio-economic reasons why the early computing boom (ENIAC, UNIVAC, IBM mainframes, early programming languages like Fortran and COBOL) was dominated by the US: massive wartime R&D, university infrastructure, and a large domestic market. But I wonder if the Anglophone world also had an orthographic advantage as well. English uses 26 letters with no diacritics, compared to other languages like Chinese (thous…

Computer character codes descended directly from pre -computer codes, either teletype or punched card. The advantage holds back through printing to writing itself; having a small , fixed set of glyphs that can represent anything is just better.

I really wonder why Arabic has never gone back to printing. What we think of the Arabic "alphabet" is just it's cursive form. They have an alphabet that is basically just Syriac. Would have been easier to render on low bit displays. wouldn't have to deal with the word initial variants etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabataean_script

Re: UTF-8 history (2003)

#26

Post by kps »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #25
kps wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer character codes descended directly from pre -computer codes, either teletype or punched card. The advantage holds back through printing to writing itself; having a small , fixed set of glyphs that can represent anything is just better.

I really wonder why Arabic has never gone back to printing. What we think of the Arabic "alphabet" is just it's cursive form. They have an alphabet that is basically just Syriac. Would have been easier to render on low bit displays. wouldn't have to deal with the word initial variants etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabataean_script

Same with Japan using mostly kanji when they have a syllabary available (while Korea invented a pretty neat alphabet and largely dropped hanja).

Re: UTF-8 history (2003)

#27

Post by anonymars »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #22
anonymars wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"UTF-8 was first officially presented at the USENIX conference in San Diego, from January 25 to 29, 1993" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 ) Hey team, we're working to release an ambitious new operating system in about 6 months, but I've decided we should burn the midnight oil to rip out and redo all of the text handling we worked on to replace it with something that was just introduced at a conference.. Oh and…

My takeaway from this story has always been that both MS and Plan 9 simply passively implemented Unicode as received. It was only IBM that had the vision to see that the encoding was wrong and they should make a new one.

But doesn't OS/2 still use UCS-2 internally? And only years later (1995+)?

Potential source: https://ia802804.us.archive.org/13/items/os2developmentrelat...

Re: UTF-8 history (2003)

#28

Post by bobmcnamara »

masfuerte wrote: post #12
bobmcnamara wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't imagine they would've wanted to change encoding between Win3.1 and NT3.1.

But they did?

UCS-2 support was first released with some add on for Win3.1(which also still did most stuff with multiple character sets).

Re: UTF-8 history (2003)

#29

Post by anthk »

bikeshaving wrote: post #6

There are socio-economic reasons why the early computing boom (ENIAC, UNIVAC, IBM mainframes, early programming languages like Fortran and COBOL) was dominated by the US: massive wartime R&D, university infrastructure, and a large domestic market. But I wonder if the Anglophone world also had an orthographic advantage as well. English uses 26 letters with no diacritics, compared to other languages like Chinese (thous…

Spanish isn't much bigger...

Re: UTF-8 history (2003)

#30

Post by anthk »

inglor_cz wrote: post #23
bikeshaving wrote: post #6

There are socio-economic reasons why the early computing boom (ENIAC, UNIVAC, IBM mainframes, early programming languages like Fortran and COBOL) was dominated by the US: massive wartime R&D, university infrastructure, and a large domestic market. But I wonder if the Anglophone world also had an orthographic advantage as well. English uses 26 letters with no diacritics, compared to other languages like Chinese (thous…

There must be some alternate universe where WWII never happened, all the talented Hungarian and Polish mathematicians, logicians etc. stayed home, and computer parts and applications carry names like Emlékezet or Wrzeszcz.

No Spanish fascism winning; thus, the Spanish left siding with the Republican France. Nazis gets lots of less support and they get crushed fast, many years earlier 1945. As for Spain itself, it wouldn't suffer a war, postwar and a National-Catholic ruralist shithole regime. No 15-20 years of backwardness compared to France/Europe until 1986 (Spain joining the pre-EU, and the postwar 1940-1950 Spain almost was on par on Europe at 1910-1920... if any, modulo the boost in the 60's because of Tourism), making itself a role model in South America. No polarized left and right in that continent, so they achieve European level standards of living. People merges Iberian humanism with the German engineering.

People like Torres Quevedo happen to exist everywhere because there are no anti-scientific people messing the education to the levels of something coming from the 18th century and before. I am no kidding. Pure creationism with Franco. By law. If you said something against religion, you were either fined, jailed or beaten up.

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