UTF-8 history (2003)
13 comments
·September 13, 2025bikeshaving
pklausler
We got lots done with 6-bit pre-ASCII encodings, actually, like CDC Display Code and Univac's Fieldata. It's more than enough for 26 letters, 10 digits, and lots of punctuation. And there are faint echoes of these early character sets remaining in ASCII -- a zero byte is ^@, for example, because @ was the zero-valued Fieldata "master space" character, which distinguished EXEC 8 control cards from source code and data cards.
ummonk
The same applies to why China had all the building blocks (pun intended) of the printing press but it was perfected by Gutenberg in Europe, where the number of glyphs was much more manageable.
zahlman
Indeed. Even if you try to split hanzi into parts it's far more unwieldy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radicals).
flohofwoe
WinNT missing out on UTF-8 and instead going with UCS-2 for their UNICODE text encoding might have been "the other" billion dollar mistake in the history of computing ;)
There was a 9 month time window between the invention of UTF-8 and the first release of WinNT (Sep 1992 to Jul 1993).
But ok fine, UTF-8 didn't really become popular until the web became popular.
But then missing the other opportunity to make the transition with the release of the first consumer version of WinNT (WinXP) nearly a decade later is inexcusable.
anonymars
"UTF-8 was first officially presented at the USENIX conference in San Diego, from January 25 to 29, 1993" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8)
Hey team, we're working to release an ambitious new operating system in about 6 months, but I've decided we should burn the midnight oil to rip out and redo all of the text handling we worked on to replace it with something that was just introduced at a conference..
Oh and all the folks building their software against the beta for the last few months, well they knew what they were getting themselves into, after all it is a beta (https://books.google.com/books?id=elEEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA1#v=onep...)
As for Windows XP, so now we're going to add a third version of the A/W APIs?
More background: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190830-00/?p=10...
nostrademons
Interestingly, there is another story on the HN front page about Steve Wozniak doing exactly that for the Apple I:
ivanjermakov
Windows using CP-125X encoding by default in many countries instead of a UTF-8 did a lot of damage, at least in my experience.
bobmcnamara
Can't imagine they would've wanted to change encoding between Win3.1 and NT3.1.
masfuerte
But they did?
rfl890
And nowadays developers have to deal with the "A/W" suffix bullshit.
xenadu02
It is worth reading the history of the proposal. The final form is superior to the others so someone was doing a lot of editing!
Take the final and second form where the use of multiple letters was eliminated, instead using "v" to indicate bits of the encoded character.
I also chuckle at the initial implementation's note about the desire to delete support for 4/5/6 byte versions. Someone was still laboring under the UCS/UTF-16 delusion that 16-bits was sufficient.
theologic
Great story and brought up on Hacker News on a regular cycle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26735958
While I love the Hacker News purity, takes me back to Usenet, it makes me wonder if a little AI could take a repost and auto insert previous postings to allow people to see previous discussions.
There are socio-economic reasons why the early computing boom (ENIAC, UNIVAC, IBM mainframes, early programming languages like Fortran and COBOL) was dominated by the US: massive wartime R&D, university infrastructure, and a large domestic market. But I wonder if the Anglophone world also had an orthographic advantage as well. English uses 26 letters with no diacritics, compared to other languages like Chinese (thousands of characters), Hindi (50+ letters), or French/German (latin with diacritics).
That simplicity made early character encodings like 7-bit ASCII feasible, which in turn lowered the hardware and software barriers for building computers, keyboards, and programming languages. In other words, the Latin alphabet’s compactness may have given English-speaking engineers a “low-friction” environment for both computation and communication. And now it’s the lingua franca for most computing on top of which support for other languages is now built.
It’s very interesting to think about how written scripts give different cultures advantages in computing and elsewhere. I wonder for instance how scripts and AI interact, like LLMs trained in Chinese are working with a high-density orthography with a stable, 3500 year dataset.