In 1978, the initial proposal for a set of "Universal Signs" was made by Bob Belleville at Xerox PARC. Many persons contributed ideas to the development of a ne

In 1978, the initial proposal for a set of "Universal Signs" was made by Bob Belleville at Xerox PARC. Many persons contributed ideas to the development of a new encoding design. Beginning in 1980, these efforts evolved into the Xerox Character Code Standard (XCCS) by the present author, a multilingual encoding which has been maintained by Xerox as an internal corporate standard since 1982, through the efforts of Ed Smura, Ron Pellar, and others. Unicode arose as the result of eight years of working experience with XCCS. Its fundamental diferences rom XCCS were proposed oy Peter Fenwick and Dave Opstad (pure 16-bit codes), and by Lee Collins (ideographic character unification), Unicode retains the many features of XCCS whose utility have been proved over the years in an international line of communicating multilingual system products.