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I think folks who weren't there might not realize how big a deal the original Unicode standard was and how quickly technology vendors raced to adopt it. Windows
by twoodfin 8y ago
I think folks who weren't there might not realize how big a deal the original Unicode standard was and how quickly technology vendors raced to adopt it. Windows NT, for example, must have been developed with Unicode in mind even before the standard was official. In those circumstances the broad adoption of UCS-2 was effectively inevitable.
Even if UTF-8 had been widely known, I don't think the eventual necessity for > 16-bit code points was clear enough to have given it a chance against the relatively easy architectural shift of replacing one fixed-length character encoding with another.
- simonh 8y agoOne factor is that back in the early 90s China was still an economically backward, closed Communist enclave barely more integrated into the global economy than North Korea is now. One of the deciding factors in having to decisively move beyond the BMP was China's adoption of GB 18030 as a mandatory standard in 2006[1]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB_18030 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB_18030
- teh_klev 8y ago> One factor is that back in the early 90s China was still an economically backward, closed Communist enclave barely more integrated into the global economy I'd disagree, China was well on the way to becoming an economic power house in the early 90's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China#Eighth_Plan_(1991%E2%80%931995) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China#Eight...
- TooBrokeToBeg 8y agoBut it wasn't yet. Decades later, the infrastructure stabilized (although in 2010 consumer network products were still incredibly chaotic).
- teh_klev 8y agoIt certainly wasn't the North Korean type of basket case simonh was accusing it of being.