The Encoding Wars
A History of Character Encoding
A narrative history that reads like a tech thriller — from telegraph codes to Unicode. Each chapter covers an era, the problems engineers faced, and the solutions they built.
Morse, Baudot, and the First Codes
The story of character encoding begins with the telegraph. This chapter traces the evolution from Morse code to Baudot's 5-bit teletypewriter code, laying the foundation for the digital age.
ASCII: 128 Characters That Changed the World
In 1963, a committee defined 128 characters that would shape computing forever. This chapter covers the ASCII debates, the 7-bit decision, control characters, and the 8th-bit problem that started the encoding wars.
The Code Page Explosion
When 128 characters weren't enough, everyone extended ASCII differently. IBM code pages, ISO 8859, Windows-1252, Shift_JIS, Big5 — this chapter chronicles the incompatibility nightmare of the 1980s and 1990s.
The Unicode Vision
In 1987, Joe Becker and Lee Collins at Xerox imagined a single encoding for all the world's characters. This chapter tells the story of the Unicode Consortium's founding and its merger with ISO 10646.
UTF-8: The Encoding That Won
Ken Thompson and Rob Pike designed UTF-8 on a placemat at a New Jersey diner in 1992. This chapter traces UTF-8's path from invention to dominance, including Gmail's mandate and the web adoption curve.
Emoji: When Characters Became Culture
From Japanese carrier emoji to Apple's 2008 keyboard to Emoji 1.0 — emoji transformed Unicode from a technical standard into a cultural phenomenon. This chapter covers the emoji revolution and the submission process.
Unicode Today and Tomorrow
Unicode 16.0 covers 154,998 characters across 168 scripts. This chapter surveys the current state of Unicode, undeciphered scripts waiting to be encoded, and AI-assisted encoding proposals.