A history of character encodings

From Reddit [1] comes Character Encodings For Modern Programmers [2], a facinating look into the history of character sets used by computers. Did you know that some form of electrical communications have existed for about 175 years [3]? Or that time-division multiplexing (multiple messages sliced into segments, sharing a single wire) was done as early as 1873 [4]? That Thomas Edison tried his hand at time-division multiplexing in 1876 [5]? Or that the first serial communication system using bits was designed in 1882 [6]? I didn't.

And we haven't even gotten to character sets yet!

I don't know … I just find this stuff interesting.

=> [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/39l0ub/character_encodings_for_modern_programmers/ | [2] http://blog.gatunka.com/2014/04/25/character-encodings-for-modern-programmers/ | [3] http://blog.gatunka.com/2014/04/14/letter-printing-telegraph-us-patent-4464/ | [4] http://www.google.com/patents/US143341 | [5] http://www.google.com/patents/US185507 | [6] http://blog.gatunka.com/2014/04/18/baudot-code-telegraph-us-patent-388244/

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