A Brief History of Character Encoding
Intended Audience: |
Software Engineers, Systems Analysts |
Session Level: |
Beginner, Intermediate |
Unicode didn't just spring fully-grown from the forehead of Zeus; it has many
historical antecedents and its design is firmly grounded in existng practice.
In fact, to understand Unicode fully, it's necessary to understand where it
came from. This talk will trace the history of character encoding in
information technology from its roots in the Morse telegraph code through to
Unicode. It will cover the Morse and Baudot telegraphy codes, IBM's BCD
punched-card code, ASCII and EBCDIC, the ISO 2022 encoding scheme, the ISO 8859
family of encodings, and various other encodings, ending with the early history
of Unicode and ISO 10646.
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