The history of characters in computers
« previous post | next post »
Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixtieth issue:
“Kanji and the Computer: A Brief History of Japanese Character Set Standards,” by James Breen.
https://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp360_kanji_computers_japanese_character_set.pdf
ABSTRACT
This paper describes the development of the character coding systems and standards that enable Japanese text to be recorded and used in computer systems. The Japanese coding systems, which were first developed in the late 1970s, pioneered the approaches to handling the large numbers of kanji characters and established a pathway that was adopted in other standards for Asian languages. The paper covers the development of the major Japanese standards and their evolution into the Unicode character standard, which is now the basis for all language coding.
—–
All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are available in full for no charge.
To view our catalog, visit http://www.sino-platonic.org/
finis
This paper is also available as a WWW page at:
https://www.edrdg.org/~jwb/paperdir/kanjicomp.html
There are some Chinese associations – the first PRC hanzi, etc. standard (GB 2312-80) was modelled on the earlier and pioneering JIS C6226-1978. And of course the Taiwanese CCCII development (aka EACC), which was the first attempt at fusing the codings of hanzi, kanji and hanja, was a precursor to the great Han Unification to took place in Unicode, and changed the coding world forever.
Selected readings
- "Triple review of books on characters and computers" (8/23/24)
- "Sinographic inputting: 'it's nothing' — not" (2/22/21) — with lengthy bibliography
- Victor H. Mair and Yongquan Liu, eds., Characters and Computers (Amsterdam, Oxford, Washington, Tokyo: IOS, 1991)