History
ASCII is defined as a 7-bit character set and has room for 128 characters. However, since this standard was designed for the United States, it does not contain characters and symbols, such as the yen (¥) symbol needed to represent Japanese currency, nor did it include space for characters from other alphabets, such as kana or kanji – thus Japanese characters could not be encoded. Further, Japanese characters, both kana and kanji, are drawn on a square grid, while Latin characters are generally written more narrowly – thus Japanese characters could not be displayed either.
JIS X 0201 was developed in 1969, a time when computers were generally incapable, both by software design and hardware resources, of representing the thousands of Chinese-based kanji characters used in Japanese. As a compromise, this standard encoded katakana (only – not hiragana or kanji) as a small set of characters, assigned in the upper byte value range of 0x80–0xFF. This allowed 8-bit processors to encode and process Japanese text phonetically (as katakana), though without being able to process hiragana or kanji. These katakana characters were in turn displayed as "half-width kana" – a new, unorthodox, narrower form factor to fit the same width as the monospaced Latin alphabets machines were capable of printing and displaying. Encoding-wise, JIS X 0201 is a variant extension of ASCII – it includes additional characters, and does not exactly agree with ASCII on the overlapping part (the Latin character section).
Half-width kana were developed as "...the first Japanese characters encoded on computers because they are used for Japanese telegrams."
To make katakana fit into the narrower cell area allowed, some compromises were made. For example, the diacritical marks dakuten and handakuten are treated as separate characters instead of being part of the preceding character. This compromise led many to consider "half-width kana" visually unattractive, and causes problems for many computer programs today.
Read more about this topic: Half-width Kana
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.”
—Henry Geldzahler (1935–1994)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)