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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: iconv "versions"
Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2024 23:02:03 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On Sun, 17 Mar 2024 15:12:15 -0700 (Seattle), Relf wrote:

> Microsoft was using UTF-8 back in 1989, as I recall.

A little bit difficult, considering it wasn’t created until 1992
<https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt>.

What Microsoft was using was the original “UCS-2” (16-bit) Unicode, which 
the Unicode Consortium had led everyone to believe would remain a fixed-
length code forever.

Then they decided that, on second thoughts, they would allow up to 20-
something bits (“UCS-4”), so the original 16-bit code became that 
monstrosity known as “UTF-16”. Which Windows and Java (and maybe one or 
two other things that adopted Unicode at just the wrong time) have been 
saddled with ever since.