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

[Yuri Khan]

On Sat, Jun 14, 2014 at 12:19 PM, Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> wrote:
> Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:
>
> I read an article on this:
>
> The 90s: 8-bits. ISO 8859-1 with the ASCII as its lower
> half. Russian: KOI8-R, ISO 8859-5, and CP1251.

http://bash.im/quote/423

Translated: “They there think that our streets are roamed by bears
with balalaikas who speak in iso-8859-5.”

To my knowledge, Russia has never spoken iso-8859-5. It is regarded as
a design-by-committee encoding bearing no connection to the needs of
real-world users.

DOS used the IBM code page 866. Windows used Windows-1251 and users
had to convert to and from DOS 866. Linux old-faith users used (and
some still use) KOI8-R. Internet users had to be able to convert at
least between Windows-1251 and KOI8-r.