[SIGCIS-Members] query: history of character codes, Unicode?

[Kevin Driscoll]

Hello Paul and SIGCIS,

I'm excited to see interest in the topic of character encoding. I explored
some related trailheads in my dissertation work on dial-up BBSs.
Specifically, I wanted to better understand the expressive use of
semigraphical characters in the construction of online interfaces. This
lead me to examine various vendor-specific character sets such as
Commodore's PETSCII, Atari's ATASCII, and Microsoft's Code Page 437 (stored
in ANSI.SYS). Unicode wasn't quite on the scene yet.

As with so many interesting side-quests, only bits of this research made it
into the final document (see: "Text, terminal, and the visual culture of
BBSing", pg 176-196, in the PDF linked below) but I am looking forward to
learning more about this area--especially given the recent diffusion of
"emoji" and other pictographic Unicode characters.

http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15799coll3/id/444362/rec/2

📳 📩  📫
Kevin Driscoll
Postdoctoral researcher
Microsoft Research New England





On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 11:00 AM, Paul N. Edwards <pne at umich.edu> wrote:

> All, vaguely related to the interesting discussion of race - on which I
> tend to agree with Tom H - here’s something that’s been niggling away at my
> historical consciousness.
>
> In 1993 Jeffrey Shapard published an intriguing article about the problems
> created by early standardization on ASCII 7- and 8-bit character codes for
> Asian and other non-alphabetic languages, which can have many thousands of
> characters (vs. the 256 representable in 8-bit ASCII). Shapard, “Islands in
> the (Data) Stream: Language, Character Codes, and Electronic Isolation in
> Japan,” in Linda Harasim, ed., *Global networks: Computers and
> international communication* (MIT Press Cambridge, MA., 1993).
>
> This problem carried over into the Web era. It was technically resolved by
> Unicode, but that standard has still not been universally adopted.
>
> I’m wondering whether any historians have written about the history of
> character encoding, especially Unicode. What I’m curious about is not the
> technical history itself, but how the character-code problem affected/was
> affected by culture (“electronic isolation," as per Shapard? indigenous
> efforts, vs. IBM’s world-market goals? alternative pathways?). Do any of
> you know archive- or interview-based accounts that go into some of the
> cultural and social background and implications?
>
> NB, there was a 3-part history of IBM's efforts in Asia, especially kanji
> representations, in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Jan.-March
> 2005, by: Hensch, K.; Iqi, T.; Iwao, M.; Oda, A.; Takeshita.
>
> There are also number of rather thorough and interesting histories by
> developer-protagonists and users, such as these:
>
> S. Searle, A Brief History of Character Codes in North America, Europe,
> and Asia <http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/characcodehist.html>
>
> S. Searle, Unicode Revisited
> <http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/unicoderevisited.html>
>
> J. Becker, Unicode 88 <http://www.unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf> (1988
> proposal from Xerox PARC)
>
> Curious for any thoughts or references.
>
> Best,
>
> Paul
>
>
> —————————————————
> Paul N. Edwards, Professor of Information <http://www.si.umich.edu> and
> History <http://www.lsa.umich.edu/history/>
> On sabbatical July-December 2015 — replies will be slow or nonexistent
>
> Terse replies are deliberate <http://five.sentenc.es/>. Here's why!
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>
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