The Unicode Standard is the system that assigns a unique number to each character used in written languages, so that computers can store and exchange text regardless of platform or program. Before it, there were hundreds of incompatible encodings, most limited to a few scripts. The standard grew out of work in the late 1980s by engineers at Xerox and Apple, including Joe Becker, Lee Collins and Mark Davis, and the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in 1991. Version 1.0 was published in October 1991. The UTF-8 encoding, created in 1992, became the dominant way to store Unicode text on the web. The standard now covers well over a hundred thousand characters in scripts from around the world, along with historic scripts and emoji.
Before and after
- from 14 September 1991 to 23 November 1991Battle of the Barracks
- 17 September 1991Release of Linux kernel
- 17 September 1991Release of Linux
- 19 September 1991Otzi the Iceman is found
- October 1991Release of The Unicode Standard
- from 29 October 1991 to 3 January 1992Operation Orkan 91
- from 31 October 1991 to 4 November 1991Operation Swath-10
- 2 November 1991Release of Vim
- from 16 November 1991 to 30 November 1991The first Women's World Cup is played in China
More in Science & technology
- 25 April 1953Watson and Crick publish the structure of DNA
- 14 February 1961Discovery of lawrencium
- 20 November 1985Creation of Microsoft Windows
- 1996Discovery of copernicium
- August 2003Discovery of moscovium
- 2006Discovery of nihonium
The era
This moment belongs to the Contemporary world (1945 CE to today), the world since 1945. You can also browse everything in the 20th century.