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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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