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.
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