How Unicode Came to "Dominate the World"

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The success of a character encoding can be measured by its ubiquity: support in operating systems, applications, programming languages, and the amount of data encoded in it. By all of these measures, Unicode is an unqualified success, and can truly be said to have dominated the world. However, back in the late 1980s, when we began discussing the need for a universal encoding and how it might achieve “world domination", success was not a given, and the original designers would not have predicted the degree of success or the changes and design compromises required for that achievement.

This talk will consider the beginning of Unicode, its original design and goals, and the key changes and decisions and circumstances that lead to Unicode’s current success (and some failures). It will conclude with speculation about where Unicode might go from here or whether Unicode will continue to enjoy its current status.

Lee Collins has an MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and has worked on international text encoding, input and display since the early 1980s.

He started his career at Xerox where he began the long collaboration with Joe Becker on the effort that was to become Unicode. He then went on to Apple where he met another Unicode founder, Mark Davis. At Apple he worked for 23 years as engineer and manager, starting with Mac OS 6, then Mac OS X and iOS. He also took several side trips to Taligent and Ariba. In 2013 he left Apple to devote full time to the study of Arabic.

Lee currently consults as Internationalization Architect at Netflix and serves as a board member of the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation. Lee first presented on Unicode at one of the first IMUG meetings in 1991. (http://www.imug.org/events/imug-1991-events.htm)

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