Back in the semi-olden days, when Unix was being invented and K&R were writing The C Programming Language, everything was very simple. EBCDIC was on its way out. The only characters that mattered were good old unaccented English letters, and we had a code for them called ASCII which was able to represent every character using a number between 32 and 127.
... all was good, assuming you were an English speaker.
Past and Present
See Also
- JavaScript Conquered the Web. Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop
- History of the World Wide Web
- Lingua franca
In fact, it has been a constant source of delight for me over the past year
to get to continually tell hordes (literally) of people who want to
— strap yourselves in, here it comes —
control what their documents look like in ways that would be trivial in TeX,
Microsoft Word, and every other common text processing environment:
“Sorry, you’re screwed.”
— Marc Andreessen (1994)