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:
J. Becker,
Unicode 88 (1988 proposal from Xerox PARC)
Curious for any thoughts or references.
Best,
Paul
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