Character Encoding
The early computer software and hardware had very little support for alphabets other than the Latin. As a result of this it was difficult or impossible to represent languages based on other scripts. The ASCII character encoding, created in the 1960s, only supported 256 different characters. With the use of additional software it was possible to provide support for some languages, for instance those based on the Cyrillic alphabet. However, complex-script languages like Chinese or Japanese need more characters than the 256 limit imposed by ASCII. Some computers created in the former USSR had native support for the Cyrillic alphabet.
The wide adoption of Unicode, and UTF-8 on the web, resolved most of these historical limitations. ASCII remains the de facto standard for command interpreters, programming languages and text-based communication protocols.
- Mojibake - Common mistakes
Read more about this topic: English In Computing
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