[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.