Unicode History & Culture

ASCII was created in 1963 by the American Standards Association to standardize communication between different computers and telegraph systems using a 7-bit character set of 128 code points. This article tells the story of ASCII's creation, the engineers behind it, and how a 60-year-old standard still underpins modern computing.

EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) was IBM's character encoding used on its mainframe computers, incompatible with ASCII and a source of data conversion headaches that persisted for decades. This article explores the history of EBCDIC, why IBM chose it over ASCII, and how it illustrates the chaos that Unicode was created to solve.

The Unicode Consortium is the non-profit organization responsible for developing and maintaining the Unicode standard, with members including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and many others. This guide explains how the Consortium works, how characters are proposed and approved, and who has voting power over the characters that define global text.

Adding a new character to Unicode requires submitting a detailed proposal to the Unicode Consortium that demonstrates the character's need, usage, and distinctness from existing characters. This guide walks through the Unicode proposal process step by step, from initial submission to final approval and inclusion in a Unicode release.

Getting a new emoji into Unicode requires a formal proposal to the Emoji Subcommittee that must meet strict selection criteria including expected usage level, distinctiveness, and compatibility across platforms. This guide explains how emoji proposals work, what criteria they must meet, and some notable success and rejection stories.

CJK unification was Unicode's decision to assign the same code points to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters with the same historical origin but sometimes different modern forms, saving space at the cost of controversy. This article explores the debate around Han unification, why it was done, and the ongoing disagreements about its impact on East Asian language users.

Mojibake — Japanese for 'character transformation' — is the garbled text that results from encoding mismatches, a problem that plagued global computing for decades before UTF-8 became dominant. This article tells the history of mojibake, the chaos of incompatible national encodings, and how Unicode gradually solved a problem that once made international email a lottery.

From the first Unicode draft in 1988 to the addition of emoji, the surpassing of 100,000 characters, and UTF-8 becoming dominant on the web in 2008, Unicode's history is marked by several transformative milestones. This article celebrates the key moments in Unicode history that shaped how we communicate digitally today.

Before Unicode became universal, the web was fragmented by incompatible national encodings that made international websites unreliable and cross-language communication difficult. This article explores how Unicode and the rise of UTF-8 transformed the internet into a truly global medium, enabling the multilingual web we use today.

Unicode is full of surprising, obscure, and occasionally humorous characters — from the interrobang ‽ to the snowman ☃ with and without snow, and characters named after internet culture. This article shares the most entertaining Unicode trivia, hidden Easter eggs, and surprising character names for the curious explorer.