These different systems were called code pages.Īnd this is how the "Windows Code pages" were born, eventually. In the ANSI standard, everybody agreed on what to do below 128, which was pretty much the same as ASCII, but there were lots of different ways to handle the characters from 128 and on up, depending on where you lived. In fact as soon as people started buying PCs outside of America all kinds of different OEM character sets were dreamed up, which all used the top 128 characters for their own purposes.Įventually this OEM free-for-all got codified in the ANSI standard. And to our contemporary amazement - it was all fine! They didn't have the Internet back than and people rarely exchanged files between systems with different locales. So now "OEM character sets" were distributed with PCs and these were still all different and incompatible. Most computers in those days were using 8-bit bytes, so not only could you store every possible ASCII character, but you had a whole bit to spare, which, if you were wicked, you could use for your own devious purposes.Īnd all was good, assuming you were an English speaker.īecause bytes have room for up to eight bits, lots of people got to thinking, "gosh, we can use the codes 128-255 for our own purposes." The trouble was, lots of people had this idea at the same time, and they had their own ideas of what should go where in the space from 128 to 255. This could conveniently be stored in 7 bits. Space was 32, the letter "A" was 65, etc. The only characters that mattered were good old unaccented English letters, and we had a code for them called ASCII which was able to represent every character using a number between 32 and 127. :)Īs a history I'll point to some quotes from there: (Thank you very much Joel! :) ) Joel Spolsky has written a very good introductionary article on the absolute minimum every dev should know on Unicode Character Encoding.īear with me here because this is going to be somewhat of a looong answer. I'd like to answer this in a more web-like manner and in order to answer it so we need a little history.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |