Editing Unicode (section)

=== {{anchor|Unicode 88}}History ===
The origins of Unicode can be traced back to the 1980s, to a group of individuals with connections to [[Xerox]]'s [[Xerox Character Code Standard|Character Code Standard]] (XCCS).<ref name="unicode-88" /> In 1987, Xerox employee [[Joe Becker (Unicode)|Joe Becker]], along with [[Apple Inc.|Apple]] employees [[Lee Collins (Unicode)|Lee Collins]] and [[Mark Davis (Unicode)|Mark Davis]], started investigating the practicalities of creating a universal character set.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Summary Narrative |url=https://www.unicode.org/history/summary.html |website=Unicode |date=August 31, 2006 |access-date=15 March 2010}}</ref> With additional input from Peter Fenwick and [[Dave Opstad]],<ref name="unicode-88" /> Becker published a draft proposal for an "international/multilingual text character encoding system in August 1988, tentatively called Unicode". He explained that "the name 'Unicode' is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding".<ref name="unicode-88">{{Cite web |last=Becker |first=Joseph D. |author-link=Joseph D. Becker |date=10 September 1998 |title=Unicode 88 |url=https://unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161125224409/https://unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf |archive-date=25 November 2016 |access-date=25 October 2016 |publisher=[[Unicode Consortium]] |quote=In 1978, the initial proposal for a set of "Universal Signs" was made by [[Bob Belleville]] at [[Xerox PARC]]. Many persons contributed ideas to the development of a new encoding design. Beginning in 1980, these efforts evolved into the [[Xerox Character Code Standard]] (XCCS) by the present author, a multilingual encoding that has been maintained by Xerox as an internal corporate standard since 1982, through the efforts of Ed Smura, Ron Pellar, and others.<br />Unicode arose as the result of eight years of working experience with XCCS. Its fundamental differences from XCCS were proposed by Peter Fenwick and Dave Opstad (pure 16-bit codes) and by [[Lee Collins (Unicode)|Lee Collins]] (ideographic character unification). Unicode retains the many features of XCCS whose utility has been proved over the years in an international line of communication multilingual system products. |orig-year=1988-08-29}}</ref>

In this document, entitled ''Unicode 88'', Becker outlined a scheme using [[16-bit computing|16-bit]] characters:<ref name="unicode-88" />

<blockquote>
Unicode is intended to address the need for a workable, reliable world text encoding. Unicode could be roughly described as "wide-body [[ASCII]]" that has been stretched to 16&nbsp;bits to encompass the characters of all the world's living languages. In a properly engineered design, 16&nbsp;bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose.
</blockquote>

This design decision was made based on the assumption that only scripts and characters in "modern" use would require encoding:<ref name="unicode-88" />

<blockquote>
Unicode gives higher priority to ensuring utility for the future than to preserving past antiquities. Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in the modern text (e.g. in the union of all newspapers and magazines printed in the world in 1988), whose number is undoubtedly far below 2<sup>14</sup> = 16,384. Beyond those modern-use characters, all others may be defined to be obsolete or rare; these are better candidates for private use registration than for congesting the public list of generally useful Unicode.
</blockquote>

In early 1989, the Unicode working group expanded to include Ken Whistler and Mike Kernaghan of Metaphor, Karen Smith-Yoshimura and Joan Aliprand of [[Research Libraries Group]], and Glenn Wright of [[Sun Microsystems]]. In 1990, Michel Suignard and Asmus Freytag of [[Microsoft]] and [[NeXT]]'s Rick McGowan had also joined the group. By the end of 1990, most of the work of remapping existing standards had been completed, and a final review draft of Unicode was ready.

The [[Unicode Consortium]] was incorporated in California on 3 January 1991,<ref>{{Cite web |title=History of Unicode Release and Publication Dates |url=https://unicode.org/history/publicationdates.html |access-date=20 March 2023 |website=Unicode}}</ref> and the first volume of ''The Unicode Standard'' was published that October. The second volume, now adding Han ideographs, was published in June 1992.

In 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. This increased the Unicode codespace to over a million code points, which allowed for the encoding of many historic scripts, such as [[Egyptian hieroglyphs]], and thousands of rarely used or obsolete characters that had not been anticipated for inclusion in the standard. Among these characters are various rarely used [[CJK characters]]—many mainly being used in proper names, making them far more necessary for a universal encoding than the original Unicode architecture envisioned.<ref name="unicoderevisited">{{Cite web |last=Searle |first=Stephen J |title=Unicode Revisited |url=http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/unicoderevisited.html |access-date=18 January 2013}}</ref>

Version 1.0 of Microsoft's TrueType specification, published in 1992, used the name "Apple Unicode" instead of "Unicode" for the Platform ID in the naming table.