Comment by anonymars | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonymars | Hacker News Reader

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"UTF-8 was first officially presented at the USENIX conference in San Diego, from January 25 to 29, 1993" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8)

Hey team, we're working to release an ambitious new operating system in about 6 months, but I've decided we should burn the midnight oil to rip out and redo all of the text handling we worked on to replace it with something that was just introduced at a conference..

Oh and all the folks building their software against the beta for the last few months, well they knew what they were getting themselves into, after all it is a beta (https://books.google.com/books?id=elEEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA1#v=onep...)

As for Windows XP, so now we're going to add a third version of the A/W APIs?

More background: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190830-00/?p=10...

Interestingly, there is another story on the HN front page about Steve Wozniak doing exactly that for the Apple I:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45265240

The 6502 and the 6800 are pretty similar. The 6501 was pin compatible with the 6800, but not software compatible; the 6501 was dropped as part of a settlement with Motorola.

Changing an in-progress system design to a similar chip that was much less expensive ($25 at the convention vs $175 for a 6800, dropped to $69 the month after the convention) is a leap of faith, but the difference in cost is obvious justification, and the Apple I had no legacy to work with.

It would have been great if Windows NT could have picked up utf-8, but it's a bigger leap and the benefit wasn't as clear; variable width code points are painful in a lot of ways, and 16-bits for a code point seemed like it would be enough for anybody.

My takeaway from this story has always been that both MS and Plan 9 simply passively implemented Unicode as received. It was only IBM that had the vision to see that the encoding was wrong and they should make a new one.

But doesn't OS/2 still use UCS-2 internally? And only years later (1995+)?

Potential source: https://ia802804.us.archive.org/13/items/os2developmentrelat...

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