Newbie question about text encoding

[Rustom Mody]

On Thursday, February 26, 2015 at 6:10:25 PM UTC+5:30, Rustom Mody wrote:
> 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

Dave's list above of instances of 'poverty is a good idea' turning out stupid and narrow-minded in hindsight is neat.  Thought I'd ack that explicitly.