Unicode: One Character Set for All Languages (1987)
by Anonymous
Before Unicode, every language had its own character encoding (ASCII, Shift-JIS, KOI8-R, etc.), making international text a nightmare. Unicode proposed one encoding for all human writing systems.
Unicode (Universal Encoding)
1987
year
Every writing system in one standard
scope
Enormous — 150,000+ characters
complexity
Chosen — UTF-8 used by 98% of websites
outcome
Keep Regional Encodings
1987
year
Each region maintains own standard
scope
Simple per region, impossible globally
complexity
Not chosen — couldn't handle multilingual content
outcome
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