[Summary]
Used since the beginning of computing, ASCII (American Standard
Code for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit coded character set
for information interchange in English. It was published in 1963
by ANSI (American National Standards Institute). With the internet
spreading worldwide, to communicate in English (and Latin) was not
enough anymore. The accented characters of several European
languages and characters of some other languages were taken into
account from 1986 onwards with 8-bit variants of ASCII, also
called extended ASCII, that provided sets of 256 characters. But
problems were not over until the publication of Unicode in January
1991 as a new universal encoding system. Unicode provided "a
unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no
matter what the program, no matter what the language", and could
handle 65,000 characters or ideograms.
***
With the internet spreading worldwide, the use of ASCII and
extended ASCII was not enough anymore, thus the need to take into
account all languages with Unicode, whose first version was
published in January 1991.
Used since the beginning of computing, ASCII (American Standard
Code for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit coded character set
for information interchange in English (and Latin). It was
published in 1963 by ANSI (American National Standards Institute).
The 7-bit plain ASCII, also called Plain Vanilla ASCII, is a set
of 128 characters with 95 printable unaccented characters (A-Z, a-
z, numbers, punctuation and basic symbols), the ones that are
available on the American / English keyboard.
With computer technology spreading outside North America, the
accented characters of several European languages and characters
of some other languages were taken into account from 1986 onwards
with 8-bit variants of ASCII, also called extended ASCII, that
provided sets of 256 characters.
Brian King, director of the WorldWide Language Institute (WWLI),
explained in September 1998: “Computer technology has
traditionally been the sole domain of a 'techie' elite, fluent in
both complex programming languages and in English -- the universal
language of science and technology. Computers were never designed
to handle writing systems that couldn't be translated into ASCII.
There wasn't much room for anything other than the 26 letters of
the English alphabet in a coding system that originally couldn't
even recognize acute accents and umlauts -- not to mention non-
alphabetic systems like Chinese. But tradition has been turned
upside down. Technology has been popularized. (…)
An extension of (local) popularization is the export of
information technology around the world. Popularization has now
occurred on a global scale and English is no longer necessarily
the lingua franca of the user. Perhaps there is no true lingua
franca, but only the individual languages of the users. One thing
is certain -- it is no longer necessary to understand English to
use a computer, nor it is necessary to have a degree in computer
science. A pull from non-English-speaking computer users and a
push from technology companies competing for global markets has
made localization a fast growing area in software and hardware
development. This development has not been as fast as it could
have been. The first step was for ASCII to become extended ASCII.
This meant that computers could begin to start recognizing the
accents and symbols used in variants of the English alphabet --
mostly used by European languages. But only one language could be
displayed on a page at a time. (...)
The most recent development [in 1998] is Unicode. Although still
evolving and only just being incorporated into the latest software,
this new coding system translates each character into 16 bits.
Whereas 8-bit extended ASCII could only handle a maximum of 256
characters, Unicode can handle over 65,000 unique characters and
therefore potentially accommodate all of the world's writing
systems on the computer. So now the tools are more or less in
place. They are still not perfect, but at last we can surf the web
in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and numerous other languages that
don't use the Western alphabet. As the internet spreads to parts
of the world where English is rarely used -- such as China, for
example, it is natural that Chinese, and not English, will be the
preferred choice for interacting with it. For the majority of the
users in China, their mother tongue will be the only choice."
First published in January 1991, Unicode "provides a unique number
for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what
the program, no matter what the language" (excerpt from the
website). This double-byte platform-independent encoding provides
a basis for the processing, storage and interchange of text data
in any language. Unicode is maintained by the Unicode Consortium,
with its variants UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 (UTF: Unicode
Transformation Format), and is a component of the specifications
of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Unicode has replaced ASCII
for text files on Windows platforms since 1998. Unicode surpassed
ASCII on the internet in December 2007.