Re: New Linux 4word

and this, stolen from http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/characcodehist.html

Ray
"
As anyone with even a casual knowledge of computing can easily predict
at this point, the future of computing is going to revolve around
networking on a worldwide scale. The Internet of today is but this
vast worldwide network in its embryonic state. However, networking on
a worldwide scale cannot take place efficiently until many more
high-speed trunk lines are laid, high-speed local lines are connected
to factories, offices, and residences, and new standards are created
for the exchange of data. Among these new standards that have to be
created, one of the most important will be a multilingual character
code set and encoding system for processing data written in all of the
world's languages. To date, two new standards have been proposed to
meet this need. One is the TRON character code and TRON Multilingual
Environment, and the other is Unicode. In the interim, the
multilingual Mule editor that runs of UNIX and UNIX-like operating
systems offers a compromise.

So how are things going to turn out in the future? That's hard to
predict, but unless the American computer vendors with or without the
help of the U.S. government try to force Unicode on the rest of the
world in some sort of "market opening campaign," the most likely
outcome is that there will be a battle between competing standards
that will eventually be decided on the basis of what computer users,
not computer vendors, prefer. The commercially available BTRON-based
operating system currently runs on the same hardware as Unicode-based
Windows NT, so all users will have to do in Japan is switch from one
side of a hard disk partition to the other to select the system of
their choice. Moreover, the Internet communication protocols, as noted
above, allow for multiple character sets and encoding methods to be
used, so this battle between competing multilingual character code
sets and encoding systems will have little effect on data networks.

And thus one can predict with certainty that for the first time in a
long time, personal computer users are really going to have a choice!
"

-- 
Ray St. Marie
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