History
Volapuk and Translit have been in use since the early days of the Internet to write e-mail messages and other texts in Russian where the support of Cyrillic fonts was limited: either the sender did not have a keyboard with Cyrillic letters or the receiver did not necessarily have Cyrillic screen fonts. In the early days, the situation was aggravated by a number of mutually incompatible computer encodings for the Cyrillic script, so that the sender and receiver were not guaranteed to have the same one. Also, the 7-bit character encoding of the early days was an additional hindrance.
Some Russian e-mail providers even included Volapuk encoding in the list of available options for the e-mails routed abroad, e.g.,
- "MIME/BASE64, MIME/Quoted-Printable, volapuk, uuencode"
By the late 90s, the encoding problem had been almost completely resolved, due to increasing support from software manufacturers and Internet service providers. Volapuk still maintains a level of use for SMS text messages, because it is possible to fit more characters in a Latinized SMS message than a unicode one. It is also used in computer games that don't allow Russian typing in chat, particularly Counter-Strike.
Read more about this topic: Volapuk Encoding
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“[Men say:] “Don’t you know that we are your natural protectors?” But what is a woman afraid of on a lonely road after dark? The bears and wolves are all gone; there is nothing to be afraid of now but our natural protectors.”
—Frances A. Griffin, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 19, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)