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Yeah, it's weird, NJ is pretty well-known for having iconic Diners. People from many different states will know about NJ diners.

https://www.tastingtable.com/1203923/best-diners-in-new-jers...

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I'm shocked that Tops earned #1 -- they did a remodel a few years ago and started taking reservations (and turning people away during busy periods if they didn't have one), and it's much less of a diner and much more of a restaurant nowadays.

Also, the Bendix Diner is closed, likely permanently, because of fire code violations.

And people not even from the states (like me) know about NJ diners because one saw the birth of Unicode :)

> … NJ diners because one saw the birth of Unicode

While it’s possible that Unicode was also conceived at a diner, you’re likely thinking of UTF-8. Unicode was from a decade earlier.

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt

Yup! That's what I was thinking about. In fact I did read this right before posting (though I had found it at https://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utf-8_history) but only to validate that it had been in a NJ diner, so I missed my confusion of UTF-8 with Unicode.

I would not make a good fact-checker :(

It's virtually guaranteed that much of the birth of Unix itself took place at NJ diners.

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