Re: Unicode/10646 History (was Re: [idn] An ignorant question about TC<-> SC)

[Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net>]

Ken,

SMI == Sun Microsystems. You have to find a person then in Building 5.
If you come up with someone other than John E. or myself, we'll be ...
surprised.

Hmm, not AIX dev at Locus, nor AIX dev in Austin, nor ACIS dev in Yorktown,
nor ACIS dev in PASC (me again, plus Austin).

Well, that's where os product was done. Not in Toronto. The right answer is
Gary Miller, Austin, but he'd give you the same answer I have. Another miss.
If the game was "What unit that did IBM's C compiler?", you'd get a point.

Mike wasn't in COSL. His group, along with Judy Chen, were on the opposite
side of the cafeteria from the operating systems people, though he was on
our cc distributions. His unit (corp-l10n) was being decimated when I was
at COSL. The right answer is (I can see his face ...) Larry ??? Yet another
miss.

I found my 1994 copy of the X/Open Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character
Set Coexistence and Migration, with its highlighted two critical lines in
section 1.2 that I used to advocate that we (Spec1170 participants, later
XPG/4.2, modernly "Unix") adopt FSS-UTF in the filesystem and character I/O
subsystems:

	Windows NT has these characteristics and is a prime example of a
	UCS system. Systems that do not have these characteristics are
	described as non-UCS systems.

I'll give you the DEC person, they were already tanking in '94, making a deal
with MicroSoft, and off the Unix standards stage.

This is fun. Keep swinging. Maybe you can prove that Unicode came from some
other venue than the printer bits of my clients, and I was simply to dull to
appreciate this higher truth. You'll need to show that the strategic and
technical managers I knew at SMI|IBM|HP had evil twins, but that shouldn't
be a problem.

Eric
Founder, X/Open; Principal Author, XPG/1
Founder, COSE; Co-Author, Spec1170, published as XPG/4.2