> doing a quick websearch, <...> > claims that Unix(tm) wasn't 8-bit clean until SVR4, in 1988.
I am not sure why this would be relevant. In the good old days we used 7 bits with parity. That is, it would be historically incorrect to say about a system in 1971 that it was 8-bit clean. One could ask whether it was 7-bit clean, and often it was. After a while the idea of parity bits disappeared, people didnt use paper tapes so much anymore (the hanging chads would return only much later) so this former parity bit was now free to be used in different ways. Software authors liked it as a "mark" bit. But Europeans liked it as a possibility to represent many more characters. No doubt ISO 8859-1 is from somewhere halfway the eighties. Relatively soon afterwards most of the software in frequent use was made 8-bit clean. Andries -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
