History
The inability of ASCII to support large character sets such as used for Chinese, Japanese and Korean led to governments and industry to find creative solutions to enable their languages to be rendered on computers. A variety of ad-hoc and usually proprietary input methods led to efforts to develop a standard system. As a result, Big5 encoding was defined by the Institute for Information Industry of Taiwan in 1984. The name "Big5" is in recognition that the standard emerged from collaboration of five of Taiwan's largest IT firms: Acer (宏碁); MiTAC (神通); JiaJia (佳佳), ZERO ONE Technology (零壹 or 01tech); and, First International Computer (FIC) (大眾).
Big5 was rapidly popularized in Taiwan and worldwide among Chinese who used the traditional Chinese character set through its adoption in several commercial software packages, notably the E-TEN Chinese DOS input system (ETen Chinese System). The Republic of China government declared Big5 as their standard in mid-1980s since it was, by then, the de facto standard for using traditional Chinese on computers.
Read more about this topic: Big5
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history is always the same the product is always different and the history interests more than the product. More, that is, more. Yes. But if the product was not different the history which is the same would not be more interesting.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)