My first real computer, an Amstrad CPC464, came with the robust Locomotive Basic in ROM, allowing the user to easily hack the hardware ASCII character set. This was awesome: all you had to do assign ...

There's an old engineering joke that says: “Standards are great … everyone should have one!” The problem is that – very often – everyone does. Consider the case of storing textual data inside a ...

Electronic communication has changed how the world is connected. It started long before Twitter, or television, or even the telephone, and the secret lies in keying and digital coding. The earliest, ...

This article was taken from the February 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands ...

It’s likely that many Hackaday readers will be aware of UTF-8, the mechanism for incorporating diverse alphabets and other characters such as 💩 emojis. It takes the long-established 7-bit ASCII ...