The Genghis Khan of Computer Language

Choman Saleem

The Genghis Khan of Computer Language

The computer world is a vast, ever-changing galaxy. The key players are innumerable. Without standards set place by organizations all over the globe, our programs, hardware, and everything in between wouldn’t be as united as they are today. Computers and electronic devices all deal with numbers, the numbers then need to be transformed and stored as a sequence of bits in the computer, which can then be used and manipulated by the processor. Before Unicode, there were numerous encoding systems which helped transition these numbers into characters. The problem was, there wasn’t a coding scheme that contained enough characters for all of the different languages.

     All of the different coding schemes didn’t work well together, or at all once introduced into a different environment. People used a different encoding system depending on what part of the world they were in. Unicode is a standard used all over the world, across a variety of machines, platforms, operating systems, programs, and languages. Unicode is used by a variety of corporations and organizations such as Apple, IBM, Oracle Microsoft, and Unysis. Unicode is maintained and promoted by a non-profit organization called The Unicode Consortium.

Source:
http://www.interproinc.com/articles.asp?id=0305