Unicode

Mark Davis (b. 1952), Joe Becker (dates unavailable), Lee Collins (dates
unavailable)
In 1985, Mark Davis and a team of engineers at Apple tried to create the first
“Kanji Macintosh”—one that could display the kanji characters used to write
modern Japanese. The challenge, they soon discovered, was not translating the
English menus to Japanese: it was representing the characters inside the
computer’s memory.
The team discovered that different techniques were used for representing the
tens of thousands of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean characters. Some
characters were represented with a single byte, others with two, and there were
“shift” codes to switch from one set to another.
It turned out that a group of engineers at Xerox were working on the same
problem. They had started working on a database to map the identical
characters in Japanese and Chinese to make it easier to create new fonts—
something now called Han unification.

Davis met with Joe Becker and Lee Collins from Xerox in 1987. They agreed
that the industry needed a single coding for all the world’s alphabets. Becker
coined the word Unicode for the project, for “unique, universal, and uniform
character encoding.”
Now with a name, the group started working on a set of technical principles.
Unicode would be based on ASCII but as 16 bits instead of 7. Sadly, this meant
that plain text files would double in size, but it also meant that plain text
would be able to include all of the accented Latin characters used throughout
Europe.
In August 1988, Becker presented the initial design, in a paper called “Unicode
88,” to an international UNIX users’ group association meeting in Dallas.
The idea for Unicode took off. A nonprofit Unicode Consortium was
incorporated in 1990 to develop, maintain, and promote software
internationalization standards, and in particular the Unicode standard. Today,
Unicode is the worldwide standard for mapping codes to characters. Unicode
has been expanded to cover dead languages such as Phoenician and fictional
languages such as Klingon. It has thousands of symbols.
Most recently, Unicode has been actively expanded to include emojis. SEE
ALSO Baudot Code (1874), ASCII (1963), Macintosh (1984)
Unicode has been expanded to include a new, popular form of communication:
emojis.