History
Initially, computer systems and system programming languages did not make a distinction between characters and bytes. This led to much confusion subsequently. Microsoft software and systems previous to the Windows NT line are examples of this, using the OEM and ANSI code pages, which do not make the distinction.
Since the late 1990s, software and systems are increasingly adopting more direct encodings of Unicode, in particular UTF-8 and UTF-16; this trend has been improved by the widespread adoption of XML, which provides a more adequate mechanism for labelling the encoding used. Recent Microsoft products and application program interfaces use Unicode internally, but many applications and APIs continue to use the default encoding of the computer's locale when reading and writing text data to files or standard output. Therefore, though Unicode is the accepted standard, there is still backwards compatibility with the older Windows code pages.
The euro sign was added relatively recently to ANSI code pages (1998 in the case of Code page 858), and certain fonts may not display it.
Read more about this topic: Windows Code Page
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of this country was made largely by people who wanted to be left alone. Those who could not thrive when left to themselves never felt at ease in America.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I saw the Arab map.
It resembled a mare shuffling on,
dragging its history like saddlebags,
nearing its tomb and the pitch of hell.”
—Adonis [Ali Ahmed Said] (b. 1930)