The History of UTF-8 as Told by Rob Pike
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Description: Rob Pike explains the history of how Ken Thompson invented UTF-8 and its first implementation in Plan 9.
The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike in one evening and how they together built the first system-wide implementation in less than a week. Subject: UTF-8 history From: "Rob 'Commander' Pike" <r (at) google.com> Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 22:32:32 -0700 (Thu 06:32 BST) To: mkuhn (at) acm.org, henry (at) spsystems.net Cc: ken (at) entrisphere.com Looking around at some UTF-8 background, I see the same incorrect story being repeated over and over. The incorrect version is: 1. IBM designed UTF-8. 2. Plan 9 implemented it. That's not true. UTF-8 was designed, in front of my eyes, on a placemat in a New Jersey diner one night in September or so 1992. What happened was this. We had used the original UTF from ISO 10646 to make Plan 9 support 16-bit characters, but we hated it. We were close to shipping the system when, late one afternoon, I received a call from some folks, I think at IBM - I remember them being in Austin - who were in an X/Open committee meeting. They wanted Ken and me to vet their FSS/UTF design. We understood why they were introducing a new design, and Ken and I suddenly realized there was an opportunity to use our experience to design a really good standard and get the X/Open guys to push it out. We suggested this and the deal was, if we could do it fast, OK. So we went to dinner, Ken figured out the bit-packing, and when we came back to the lab after dinner we called the X/Open guys and explained our scheme. We mailed them an outline of our spec, and they replied saying that it was better than theirs (I don't believe I ever actually saw their proposal; I know I don't remember it) and how fast could we implement it? I think this was a Wednesday night and we promised a complete running system by Monday, which I think was when their big vote was. So that night Ken wrote packing and unpacking code and I started tearing into the C and graphics libraries. The next day all the code was done and we started converting the
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