Revision of UTF-8 history in draft-yergeau-rfc2279bis-05.txt

[Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>]

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-yergeau-rfc2279bis-05.txt says:
>   UTF-8 was originally a project of the X/Open Joint
>   Internationalization Group XOJIG with the objective to specify a File
>   System Safe UCS Transformation Format [FSS_UTF] that is compatible
>   with UNIX systems, supporting multilingual text in a single encoding.
>   The original authors were Gary Miller, Greger Leijonhufvud and John
>   Entenmann.  Later, Ken Thompson and Rob Pike did significant work for
>   the formal definition of UTF-8.

The currently ongoing revision of the UTF-8 RFC may be a good
opportunity to unrewrite the history of this encoding.
What we know today as UTF-8 was actually designed by Ken Thompson in the
presence of Rob Pike during the evening hours of 1992-09-02 in a New
Jersey diner. It was then taken on board the standards bandwagon by the
X/Open joint i18n group, who had drafted an earlier FSS-UTF shortly
before (the one you quote), which however had less useful
synchronization properties and was therefore quickly forgotten about.

See my short UTF-8 history on

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#history

for details and witness testimony.

Markus

-- 
Markus Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ || CB3 0FD, Great Britain