>So we went to dinner, Ken figured out the
bit-packing, and when we came back to the lab after dinner we called
the X/Open guys and explained our scheme. We mailed them an outline
of our spec, and they replied saying that it was better than theirs (I
don't believe I ever actually saw their proposal; I know I don't
remember it) and how fast could we implement it? I think this was a
Wednesday night and we promised a complete running system by Monday,
which I think was when their big vote was.
>So that night Ken wrote packing and unpacking code and I started
tearing into the C and graphics libraries. The next day all the code
was done and we started converting the text files on the system
itself. By Friday some time Plan 9 was running, and only running,
what would be called UTF-8. We called X/Open and the rest, as they
say, is slightly rewritten history.
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt
>So we went to dinner, Ken figured out the bit-packing, and when we came back to the lab after dinner we called the X/Open guys and explained our scheme. We mailed them an outline of our spec, and they replied saying that it was better than theirs (I don't believe I ever actually saw their proposal; I know I don't remember it) and how fast could we implement it? I think this was a Wednesday night and we promised a complete running system by Monday, which I think was when their big vote was.
>So that night Ken wrote packing and unpacking code and I started tearing into the C and graphics libraries. The next day all the code was done and we started converting the text files on the system itself. By Friday some time Plan 9 was running, and only running, what would be called UTF-8. We called X/Open and the rest, as they say, is slightly rewritten history.