Newbie question about text encoding

[Rustom Mody]

On Wednesday, February 25, 2015 at 2:12:09 AM UTC+5:30, Dave Angel wrote:
> On 02/24/2015 02:57 PM, Laura Creighton wrote:
> > Dave Angel
> > are you another Native English speaker living in a world where ASCII
> > is enough?
> 
> I'm a native English speaker, and 7 bits is not nearly enough.  Even if 
> I didn't currently care, I have some history:
> 
> No.  CDC display code is enough. Who needs lowercase?
> 
> No.  Baudot code is enough.
> 
> No, EBCDIC is good enough.  Who cares about other companies.
> 
> No, the "golf-ball" only holds this many characters.  If we need more, 
> we can just get the operator to switch balls in the middle of printing.
> 
> No. 2 digit years is enough.  This world won't last till the millennium 
> anyway.
> 
> No.  2k is all the EPROM you can have.  Your code HAS to fit in it, and 
> only 1.5k RAM.
> 
> No.  640k is more than anyone could need.
> 
> No, you cannot use a punch card made on a model 26 keypunch in the same 
> deck as one made on a model 29.  Too bad, many of the codes are 
> different.  (This one cost me travel back and forth between two 
> different locations with different model keypunches)
> 
> No. 8 bits is as much as we could ever use for characters.  Who could 
> possibly need names or locations outside of this region?  Or from 
> multiple places within it?
> 
> 35 years ago I helped design a serial terminal that "spoke" Chinese, 
> using a two-byte encoding.  But a single worldwide standard didn't come 
> until much later, and I cheered Unicode when it was finally unveiled.
> 
> I've worked with many printers that could only print 70 or 80 unique 
> characters.  The laser printer, and even the matrix printer are 
> relatively recent inventions.

Wrote something up on why we should stop using ASCII:
http://blog.languager.org/2015/02/universal-unicode.html

(Yeah the world is a bit larger than a small bunch of islands off a half-continent.
But this is not that discussion!)