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.

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.

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.

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.