The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Thursday, June 25, 2015

A history of character encodings

From Reddit comes Character Encodings For Modern Programmers, a facinating look into the history of character sets used by computers. Did you know that some form of electrical communications have existed for about 175 years? Or that time-division multiplexing (multiple messages sliced into segments, sharing a single wire) was done as early as 1873? That Thomas Edison tried his hand at time-division multiplexing in 1876? Or that the first serial communication system using bits was designed in 1882? I didn't.

And we haven't even gotten to character sets yet!

I don't know … I just find this stuff interesting.

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