Edwin F. Hart <edwin.hart@jhuapl.edu> wrote:
> Actually, there were 3 very similar proposals in the draft stage and
> the 3 differed in only a few character assignments:
>
> ECMA 94, ISO 8859-1, and ANSI dp 131.2 (or 132.2)
>
> I heard that representatives from the 3 organizations developed a
> compromise proposal that became ECMA 94 and ISO 8859-1. The ANSI
> proposal was never progressed beyond the draft stage and in the early
> 1990s, ANSI/ISO 8859-1 was adopted instead as the "8-bit ASCII"
> standard.
>
> The DEC multilingual page is likely based on one of the 3 drafts.
> However, DEC had to commit the design before the compromise was
> reached and final standards were approved.
That sounds very much like the story I read concerning Microsoft. MS
adopted the ANSI standard (possibly only a draft standard at the time)
for Windows before it was approved as an ISO standard. I have no
trouble believing there were changes or a compromise; that does not
change what MS did.
No doubt MS added the extra graphics characters to the 0x80-0x9F range
without any worries about conflicting with the C1 range, since few
people dreamed in the mid-1980s that one day PCs would all be connected
to the Internet and would be exchanging data with ISO 2022-compliant
systems.
I would be interested to hear what Chris, Murray, or any other Microsoft
people can add to this.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:00 EDT