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WonderLanguage technology fact

Unicode is the shared standard that gives every letter, symbol and emoji its own fixed number, so text written on one device reads the same on another.

Unicode Consortium

TechnologyLanguageDesign

The story behind the card

Before Unicode, computers used hundreds of separate encodings, so the same number could stand for different letters on different systems, and text in another language often turned into strings of nonsense symbols. In 1987 Joe Becker of Xerox and Lee Collins and Mark Davis of Apple began planning a single universal character set. The Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California in January 1991, and the first volume of the standard appeared that October. Unicode 2.0, in 1996, broke the original 16-bit limit and made room for over a million code points, as the numbers are called, so that historic scripts such as Egyptian hieroglyphs could be added. Today it covers more than 170,000 characters in 175 scripts, though each one still needs a font that can draw it.

Türkçe oku
Unicode, her harfe, simgeye ve emojiye sabit bir numara veren ortak standarttır; bu sayede bir cihazda yazılan metin başka bir cihazda da aynı okunur.

Unicode'dan önce bilgisayarlar yüzlerce ayrı kodlama kullanıyordu. Aynı sayı farklı sistemlerde farklı harfleri gösterebiliyor, başka bir dildeki metin çoğu zaman anlamsız işaretlere dönüşüyordu. 1987'de Xerox'tan Joe Becker ile Apple'dan Lee Collins ve Mark Davis, tek ve evrensel bir karakter kümesi üzerinde çalışmaya başladı. Unicode Konsorsiyumu Ocak 1991'de Kaliforniya'da kuruldu; standardın ilk cildi de aynı yılın ekim ayında çıktı. 1996'daki Unicode 2.0, başlangıçtaki 16 bitlik sınırı aşarak bir milyonun üzerinde kod noktasına, yani karakterlere verilebilecek numaraya yer açtı; Mısır hiyeroglifleri gibi tarihî yazılar da böylece eklenebildi. Bugün standart 175 yazı sisteminde 170.000'den fazla karakteri kapsıyor; ama her karakterin ekranda görünmesi için onu çizebilen bir yazı tipi hâlâ gerekiyor.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Unicode
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