The Absolute Minimum Every Developer Must Know About Unicode (2003)
joelonsoftware.com
1 thread
Joel is pretty good, but UTF-8 wasn't designed by California hippies. It was designed in New Jersey by a Louisianan (Ken Thompson) and a Canadian (Rob Pike).
I think what he's saying is we had unicode in the form of UCS-2 but Silicon Valley programmers refused to use it because it was wasteful.
When Thompson and Pike finally invented UTF-8 was when things started getting moving.