Facts for fans: encodings history (was: Re: Getting Emacs to play nice with Hunspell and apostrophes)

[Emanuel Berg]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

>> Yuri Khan writes:
>>
>> You could order a book in an Internet shop, have
>> them completely b0rk up the encoding of the shipping
>> address:
>>
>> http://cdn.imagepush.to/in/625x2090/i/3/30/301/24.jpg
>>
>> Then somebody at the postal system might decode the
>> characters and the package would still be delivered
>> at the intended address.
>
> Ha-ha, unbelievable! How did that happen? First you
> wrote in Russian at the Internet shop's web page -
> then it got like that because of them translating
> Unicode (?) to ISO-8859-1 (which is 8-bit, with the
> ASCII as its lower half) - ? Why didn't the Internet
> shop do it?  Did they actually think that was a
> language or some transcription of Russian? How was it
> translated to Russian at the postal office? I can
> only make out the first line: Russia, Moscow.

I read an article on this:

Pre-1990s: the 7-bit period. US-ASCII, with ISO 646 in
Scandinavia and Finland (with 0x5B-D and 0x7B-D
replaced with national chars: those were [ \ ]
and { | } respectively in the US-ASCII).

The 90s: 8-bits. ISO 8859-1 with the ASCII as its lower
half. Russian: KOI8-R, ISO 8859-5, and CP1251.

2000s: the multi-byte era. EUC and ISO 2022-JP for
CJK. Linux moves from 8859 to UTF-8, an
ASCII-compatible implementation of the likely future
standard Unicode/ISO 10646.

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