A Brief History of Character Encoding: From Morse Code to Unicode
Character encoding has evolved from Morse code to ASCII to Latin-1 to Unicode over 150 years. This guide traces the history and explains why Unicode finally solved the problem.
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Tags: encoding, unicode, history
A Brief History of Character Encoding: From Morse Code to Unicode The history of character encoding is the history of computers trying to represent human language. It's a story of clever hacks, regional fragmentation, a 40-year standards war, and ultimately an elegant solution that now underpins every text on the internet. Here's how we got from Morse code to 😀. The IBM Era: EBCDIC and the 6-Bit Codes (1950s–early 1960s) Early computers used 6-bit codes (64 possible values) or proprietary encodings that varied by manufacturer. IBM's BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) packed decimal digits into 4-bit nibbles. IBM's BCDIC extended this with letters for punched cards. In 1964, IBM introduced EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) for its System/360 mainframe. EBCDIC was an 8-bit…
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