There are socio-economic reasons why the early computing boom (ENIAC, UNIVAC, IBM mainframes, early programming languages like Fortran and COBOL) was dominated by the US: massive wartime R&D, university infrastructure, and a large domestic market. But I wonder if the Anglophone world also had an orthographic advantage as well. English uses 26 letters with no diacritics, compared to other languages like Chinese (thousands of characters), Hindi (50+ letters), or French/German (latin with diacritics).
That simplicity made early character encodings like 7-bit ASCII feasible, which in turn lowered the hardware and software barriers for building computers, keyboards, and programming languages. In other words, the Latin alphabet’s compactness may have given English-speaking engineers a “low-friction” environment for both computation and communication. And now it’s the lingua franca for most computing on top of which support for other languages is now built.
It’s very interesting to think about how written scripts give different cultures advantages in computing and elsewhere. I wonder for instance how scripts and AI interact, like LLMs trained in Chinese are working with a high-density orthography with a stable, 3500 year dataset.
jcranmer 4 hours ago [-]
> English uses 26 letters with no diacritics, compared to other languages like Chinese (thousands of characters), Hindi (50+ letters), or French/German (latin with diacritics).
The English language has diacritics (see words like naïve, façade, résumé, or café). It's just that the English language uses them so rarely that they are largely dropped in any context where they are hard to introduce. Note that this adaptation to lack-of-diacritic can be found in other Latin script languages: French similarly is prone to loss-of-diacritic (especially in capital letters), whereas German has alternative spelling rules (e.g., Schroedinger instead of Schrödinger).
ummonk 5 hours ago [-]
The same applies to why China had all the building blocks (pun intended) of the printing press but it was perfected by Gutenberg in Europe, where the number of glyphs was much more manageable.
Computer character codes descended directly from pre-computer codes, either teletype or punched card. The advantage holds back through printing to writing itself; having a small, fixed set of glyphs that can represent anything is just better.
Pet_Ant 3 hours ago [-]
I really wonder why Arabic has never gone back to printing. What we think of the Arabic "alphabet" is just it's cursive form. They have an alphabet that is basically just Syriac. Would have been easier to render on low bit displays. wouldn't have to deal with the word initial variants etc.
Same with Japan using mostly kanji when they have a syllabary available (while Korea invented a pretty neat alphabet and largely dropped hanja).
pklausler 4 hours ago [-]
We got lots done with 6-bit pre-ASCII encodings, actually, like CDC Display Code and Univac's Fieldata. It's more than enough for 26 letters, 10 digits, and lots of punctuation. And there are faint echoes of these early character sets remaining in ASCII -- a zero byte is ^@, for example, because @ was the zero-valued Fieldata "master space" character, which distinguished EXEC 8 control cards from source code and data cards.
duskwuff 4 hours ago [-]
> a zero byte is ^@, for example, because...
A zero byte is ^@ because 0x00 + 64 = '@'. The same pattern holds for all C0 control codes.
pklausler 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, and why is '@' at 0x40?
anthk 48 minutes ago [-]
Spanish isn't much bigger...
inglor_cz 3 hours ago [-]
There must be some alternate universe where WWII never happened, all the talented Hungarian and Polish mathematicians, logicians etc. stayed home, and computer parts and applications carry names like Emlékezet or Wrzeszcz.
anthk 41 minutes ago [-]
No Spanish fascism winning; thus, the Spanish left siding with the Republican France.
Nazis gets lots of less support and they get crushed fast, many years earlier 1945.
As for Spain itself, it wouldn't suffer a war, postwar and a National-Catholic
ruralist shithole regime.
No 15-20 years of backwardness
compared to France/Europe until 1986 (Spain joining the pre-EU, and the postwar 1940-1950 Spain almost was on par on Europe at 1910-1920... if any, modulo the boost in the 60's because of Tourism), making itself
a role model in South America. No polarized left and right in that continent, so
they achieve European level standards of living. People merges Iberian humanism
with the German engineering.
People like Torres Quevedo happen to exist everywhere because
there are no anti-scientific people messing the education to the
levels of something coming from the 18th century and before.
I am no kidding. Pure creationism with Franco. By law. If you said something
against religion, you were either fined, jailed or beaten up.
flohofwoe 5 hours ago [-]
WinNT missing out on UTF-8 and instead going with UCS-2 for their UNICODE text encoding might have been "the other" billion dollar mistake in the history of computing ;)
There was a 9 month time window between the invention of UTF-8 and the first release of WinNT (Sep 1992 to Jul 1993).
But ok fine, UTF-8 didn't really become popular until the web became popular.
But then missing the other opportunity to make the transition with the release of the first consumer version of WinNT (WinXP) nearly a decade later is inexcusable.
anonymars 5 hours ago [-]
"UTF-8 was first officially presented at the USENIX conference in San Diego, from January 25 to 29, 1993" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8)
Hey team, we're working to release an ambitious new operating system in about 6 months, but I've decided we should burn the midnight oil to rip out and redo all of the text handling we worked on to replace it with something that was just introduced at a conference..
The 6502 and the 6800 are pretty similar. The 6501 was pin compatible with the 6800, but not software compatible; the 6501 was dropped as part of a settlement with Motorola.
Changing an in-progress system design to a similar chip that was much less expensive ($25 at the convention vs $175 for a 6800, dropped to $69 the month after the convention) is a leap of faith, but the difference in cost is obvious justification, and the Apple I had no legacy to work with.
It would have been great if Windows NT could have picked up utf-8, but it's a bigger leap and the benefit wasn't as clear; variable width code points are painful in a lot of ways, and 16-bits for a code point seemed like it would be enough for anybody.
edflsafoiewq 3 hours ago [-]
My takeaway from this story has always been that both MS and Plan 9 simply passively implemented Unicode as received. It was only IBM that had the vision to see that the encoding was wrong and they should make a new one.
anonymars 2 hours ago [-]
But doesn't OS/2 still use UCS-2 internally? And only years later (1995+)?
Windows using CP-125X encodings by default in many countries instead of a UTF-8 did a lot of damage, at least in my experience.
andrewl-hn 4 hours ago [-]
For many European languages like French or German the switch from local CP-encodings meant that only some characters like å, ñ, ç, etc. would require extra bytes. And thus the switch to UTF-8 was a no-brainer.
On the other hand, Cyrillic and Greek are two examples of short alphabets that allowed combining them with ASCII into a single-byte encoding for countries like Greece, Bulgaria, Russia, etc. For those locations switching to UTF-8 meant that you need extra bytes for all characters in a local language, and thus higher storage, memory, and bandwidth requirements for all computing. So, non-Unicode encodings stuck there for a lot longer.
gblargg 21 minutes ago [-]
And back then Unicode was just 16 bits so UTF-8 wasn't such an obvious advantage in flexibility.
bobmcnamara 5 hours ago [-]
Can't imagine they would've wanted to change encoding between Win3.1 and NT3.1.
masfuerte 4 hours ago [-]
But they did?
bobmcnamara 56 minutes ago [-]
UCS-2 support was first released with some add on for Win3.1(which also still did most stuff with multiple character sets).
kimixa 11 minutes ago [-]
IIRC Win32s (the subset of win32 released for windows 3.1) only added UCS-2 string processing, none of the system wide character APIs.
I think all the actual OS was still codepage (with the "multibyte" versions for things like Eastern languages being pretty much forks), and windows95 wasn't really much different.
rfl890 5 hours ago [-]
And nowadays developers have to deal with the "A/W" suffix bullshit.
gpvos 4 hours ago [-]
"as told by Rob Pike" is an essential part of the title, can that be added/reinstated?
xenadu02 5 hours ago [-]
It is worth reading the history of the proposal. The final form is superior to the others so someone was doing a lot of editing!
Take the final and second form where the use of multiple letters was eliminated, instead using "v" to indicate bits of the encoded character.
I also chuckle at the initial implementation's note about the desire to delete support for 4/5/6 byte versions. Someone was still laboring under the UCS/UTF-16 delusion that 16-bits was sufficient.
Rendello 4 hours ago [-]
They pretty much got their wish, bytes 5 and 6 are gone, along with half of byte 4!
While I love the Hacker News purity, takes me back to Usenet, it makes me wonder if a little AI could take a repost and auto insert previous postings to allow people to see previous discussions.
That simplicity made early character encodings like 7-bit ASCII feasible, which in turn lowered the hardware and software barriers for building computers, keyboards, and programming languages. In other words, the Latin alphabet’s compactness may have given English-speaking engineers a “low-friction” environment for both computation and communication. And now it’s the lingua franca for most computing on top of which support for other languages is now built.
It’s very interesting to think about how written scripts give different cultures advantages in computing and elsewhere. I wonder for instance how scripts and AI interact, like LLMs trained in Chinese are working with a high-density orthography with a stable, 3500 year dataset.
The English language has diacritics (see words like naïve, façade, résumé, or café). It's just that the English language uses them so rarely that they are largely dropped in any context where they are hard to introduce. Note that this adaptation to lack-of-diacritic can be found in other Latin script languages: French similarly is prone to loss-of-diacritic (especially in capital letters), whereas German has alternative spelling rules (e.g., Schroedinger instead of Schrödinger).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabataean_script
A zero byte is ^@ because 0x00 + 64 = '@'. The same pattern holds for all C0 control codes.
People like Torres Quevedo happen to exist everywhere because there are no anti-scientific people messing the education to the levels of something coming from the 18th century and before. I am no kidding. Pure creationism with Franco. By law. If you said something against religion, you were either fined, jailed or beaten up.
There was a 9 month time window between the invention of UTF-8 and the first release of WinNT (Sep 1992 to Jul 1993).
But ok fine, UTF-8 didn't really become popular until the web became popular.
But then missing the other opportunity to make the transition with the release of the first consumer version of WinNT (WinXP) nearly a decade later is inexcusable.
Hey team, we're working to release an ambitious new operating system in about 6 months, but I've decided we should burn the midnight oil to rip out and redo all of the text handling we worked on to replace it with something that was just introduced at a conference..
Oh and all the folks building their software against the beta for the last few months, well they knew what they were getting themselves into, after all it is a beta (https://books.google.com/books?id=elEEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA1#v=onep...)
As for Windows XP, so now we're going to add a third version of the A/W APIs?
More background: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190830-00/?p=10...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45265240
Changing an in-progress system design to a similar chip that was much less expensive ($25 at the convention vs $175 for a 6800, dropped to $69 the month after the convention) is a leap of faith, but the difference in cost is obvious justification, and the Apple I had no legacy to work with.
It would have been great if Windows NT could have picked up utf-8, but it's a bigger leap and the benefit wasn't as clear; variable width code points are painful in a lot of ways, and 16-bits for a code point seemed like it would be enough for anybody.
Potential source: https://ia802804.us.archive.org/13/items/os2developmentrelat...
On the other hand, Cyrillic and Greek are two examples of short alphabets that allowed combining them with ASCII into a single-byte encoding for countries like Greece, Bulgaria, Russia, etc. For those locations switching to UTF-8 meant that you need extra bytes for all characters in a local language, and thus higher storage, memory, and bandwidth requirements for all computing. So, non-Unicode encodings stuck there for a lot longer.
I think all the actual OS was still codepage (with the "multibyte" versions for things like Eastern languages being pretty much forks), and windows95 wasn't really much different.
Take the final and second form where the use of multiple letters was eliminated, instead using "v" to indicate bits of the encoded character.
I also chuckle at the initial implementation's note about the desire to delete support for 4/5/6 byte versions. Someone was still laboring under the UCS/UTF-16 delusion that 16-bits was sufficient.
The RFC that restricted it: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3629#page-11
A UTF-8 playground: https://utf8-playground.netlify.app/
While I love the Hacker News purity, takes me back to Usenet, it makes me wonder if a little AI could take a repost and auto insert previous postings to allow people to see previous discussions.