History
Common examples of character encoding systems include Morse code, the Baudot code, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) and Unicode.
Morse code was introduced in the 1840s and is used to encode each letter of the Latin alphabet, each Arabic numeral, and some other characters via a series of long and short presses of a telegraph key. Representations of characters encoded using Morse code varied in length.
The Baudot code was created by Émile Baudot in 1870, patented in 1874, modified by Donald Murray in 1901, and standardized by CCITT as International Telegraph Alphabet No. 2 (ITA2) in 1930.
ASCII was introduced in 1963 and is a 7-bit encoding scheme used to encode letters, numerals, symbols, and device control codes as fixed-length codes using integers.
IBM's Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (usually abbreviated EBCDIC) is an 8-bit encoding scheme developed in 1963.
The limitations of such sets soon became apparent, and a number of ad hoc methods were developed to extend them. The need to support more writing systems for different languages, including the CJK family of East Asian scripts, required support for a far larger number of characters and demanded a systematic approach to character encoding rather than the previous ad hoc approaches.
Early binary repertoires include:
- Bacon's cipher
- Braille
- International maritime signal flags
- Chinese telegraph code (Hans Schjellerup, 1869, modified 1872 and following)
- Encoding of Chinese characters as 4-digit decimals.
Read more about this topic: Character Encoding
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“The principal office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.”
—Tacitus (c. 55–c. 120)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)