UTF-8 turned 20 years old (in 2012)
Read OriginalThis article is a first-person historical account by Rob Pike, co-creator of UTF-8, detailing its inception in 1992. It describes the problems with previous encodings, the challenge from X/Open, and the famous diner meeting where Ken Thompson sketched the UTF-8 bit-packing design on a paper placemat. It reflects on the encoding's technical elegance and its global impact on text representation.
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