Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] List of authors in about dialog, need some help

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 22 May 2004 00:20:57 -0700
On Fri, May 21, 2004 at 07:58:04PM +0200, Ulf Lamping wrote:
> Well, I can remember times with 7-bit ASCII, no äöü (and such) for 
> german people like me at all :-)

...and then various PC code pages, Mac character sets, and ISO 8859
character sets appeared - and then came Unicode/ISO 10646, but many
UN*Xes had already used various ISO 8859 or other EUC character sets, or
their own character sets, so UN*Xes couldn't just go from ASCII to UTF-8
and not worry about the other character sets.

Had ASCII been Unicode from the beginning, that wouldn't have happened -
but, at the time, people might have balked at 16 bits per character,
just as some balked at 4 digits of year number.

(Actually, weren't there national variants of ISO 646, with ASCII being
the US national variant, and other national variants replacing some of
the special characters with acented letters?)