3 ms·

NT was being designed starting in 1988 or 1989. You don't change your character encoding throughout the operating system on a whim a year before release, though

• chrismorgan 6y ago
  That’s fair, and careless of me to forget about. I wasn’t around at the time, but the whole A/W split still seems a bit strange to me—that most of the problems that followed only really happened because Microsoft blessed UCS-2 in this way (“use codepages, or Unicode via UCS-2”), rather than continuing to use the codepage mechanism to distinguish things, which would have allowed an easy transition to UTF-8 (where even switching shortly before release would probably have been quite feasible) rather than being stuck trying to perpetuate something bad by making it even worse. (Sure, there would have been different problems using the codepage mechanism in this way, but I think they would have been lesser problems and that they would have led to a much happier future where UTF-16 might even never have happened.) As it is, they’ve finally headed in this direction of using a UTF-8 codepage on the A functions, but only in the last three years. It’s a pity they didn’t do it this way from the start (well, with some other Unicode encoding that existed), 30 years ago.