Editing Big5 (section)

==History==
The inability of ASCII to support large [[CJK characters|Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK)]] character sets led to governments and industry to find creative solutions to enable their languages to be rendered on computers. A variety of ad hoc and usually proprietary input methods led to efforts to develop a standard system. As a result, Big5 encoding was defined by the [[Institute for Information Industry]] of Taiwan in 1984.

The name "Big5" is in recognition that the standard emerged from collaboration of five of Taiwan's largest IT firms:

* [[Acer Inc.|Acer]] ([[:zh:宏碁|宏碁]])
* [[MiTAC]] (神通)
* JiaJia (佳佳)
* ZERO ONE Technology (零壹 or [http://www.01tech.com/ 01tech])
* [[First International Computer|First International Computer (FIC)]] (大眾)

Big5 was rapidly popularized in Taiwan and worldwide among Chinese who used the traditional Chinese character set through its adoption in several commercial software packages, notably the [[E-TEN]] Chinese [[DOS]] input system ([[ETen Chinese System]]). The [[Republic of China]] government declared '''Big5''' as their standard in mid-1980s since it was, by then, the ''de facto'' standard for using traditional Chinese on computers.