Questions about Unicode history

From: Marco Cimarosti (marco.cimarosti@essetre.it)
Date: Wed Jan 30 2002 - 12:29:05 EST


Hallo.

I am writing a short article about Unicode, and I realized that I don't know
or I am not sure of many Unicode-related facts and dates that I would like
to mention.

I apologize for this is a huge list of questions (and I hope that they are
not all in the FAQ). Anyway, if anybody is in the mood for trivia, I thank
you in advance:

- When did the Unicode project start, and who started it?

- Is it true Han Unification was the core of Unicode, and the idea of an
universal encoding come afterwards?

- Who and when invented the name "Unicode"?

- When did the ISO 10646 project start?

- When did Unicode and ISO 10646 merge?

- What is the name of the GB and JIS standards that have the same repertoire
as Unicode?

- When did Unicode stop to be "16 bits"? (I.e., when were surrogates added?)

- I can't remember the version when some scripts were added: Syriac, Thaana,
Sinhala, Tibetan, Myanmar, Ethiopic, Cherokee, Canadian Syllabics, Ogham,
Runes, Khmer, Mongolian, Yi, Etruscan, Gothic, Deseret, CJK ext. A, CJK ext.
B.

- Roughly, how many ideographs are in modern use in extensions A and B?

- Roughly, when will version 3.2 become official?

- Roughly, when will the version 4 book be published?

I also have a few non-Unicode questions:

- When was ASCII first published and by whom?

- What standard was current before ASCII? (BAUDOT, is it?) How many bits did
it use?

- Did the ASCII standard expire, and when?

- When was ISO 646 published?

- I think that ISO 646 expired. When?

- When was ISO 8859 published?

- When did the first double-byte encoding appear?

- Are OpenType fonts currently implemented in any platform other than
Windows?

Thanks again, in advance.

_ Marco



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