Character Encoding History: ASCII to Unicode
Character encoding evolved from Morse code through ASCII and Latin-1 to Unicode over 150 years. Learn why each standard fell short and how Unicode solved it.
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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 Pre-Digital Era: Morse and Baudot (1830s–1870s) Long before computers, engineers needed to encode text for transmission over telegraph wires. The solutions they invented laid conceptual groundwork for everything that followed. Samuel Morse's code (1838) mapped letters to sequences of dots and dashes. It wasn't a binary encoding in the modern sense — it was variable-length and designed for human operators to memorize. But…
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