Antoine Leca wrote on 2002-12-06 18:30 UTC: > Henry Spencer wrote: > > It did not come from 10646 either; it came from the *Unix* side of the > > house, specifically from X/Open. > > I thought it came from Plan 9 (Rune) then passed to X-Open (FSS-UTF?). > Did I miss something? Note I was not there at this time.
UTF-FSS appeared first in an X/Open document authored by an IBM employee (thank god they didn't patent it). The Plan9 people got it from there and were the first to migrate an entire operating system to Unicode in ~1992. Someone in the ISO WG later came up with the name UTF-8 for UTF-FSS. Linux was AFAIK after Plan9 the second operating system with some initial UTF-8 support (the UTF-8 console mode by yours truly in late 1995), but it took until 1999 until significant progress was made with glibc, xterm and the first X11 fonts, this list, etc. I think only during 2002 was the critical mass reached that will ensure that GNU/Linux (and with ~2 year delay most other Unices) will eventually move almost entirely to UTF-8. If someone has the original X/Open submission by IBM about UTF-FSS, I'd love to get a nicely scanned copy. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
