The Blog Of Dysfunction

Computers were developed in the Western nations and as a consequence English automatically became the language of communication in that field. Since the permeation of the computers was low in non English countries, and since most computer users in those countries were comfortable with English, no effort was made to adapt the usage into other languages. Things changed, however, with the cheapening of the personal computers, coupled with the arrival of the net.

What was once confined to clean-rooms in Universities are now part of a large number of study (and even bed) rooms. With that increased access has also come an increased number of people who wish to use the computer and the net without the same access to the English language which was presumed a must till a few years ago. Here we face the main problem

At the time that English was sufficient, all the English letters, numerals, and a liberal number of other language-related symbols were coded into the computer using what is known as the ASCII (the meaning of which will not add anything this communication, so I leave it as an abbreviation). However, once all the possible codes were filled up in ASCII slots, there was no place for non English languages, which needed thousands more slots to fill up their alphabets and their combinations (which in almost all non English languages are more numerous than the original alphabets).

Creative computer programmers solved the problem by developing software which simply replaced the English ASCII when a non English language was used. But the problem was, there were too many creative people and none of them had the desire to consult each other or share their code with each other. Thus if ten people developed software to handle a given non English language, they came up with ten different (read, incompatible) systems. Each system could read what was typed by it, but jumbled what others did in the same language. This is the reason why web-development or blogging in non English languages became difficult.

The proliferation of incompatible software in non English language meant that to read websites and blogs in a single non English language, one needed to have the dozens of software using which the websites are coded. This is just the opposite of the internet philosophy, when tries to simplify everything.

The problem was solved (partially) by developing the system known as Unicode. [To Continue]

Dr. Johnson C. Philip

PS: Before reading my next article in this series, for self-enrichment you can see my Unicode Hindi blog at www.Sarathi.info