In the past, relatively short history of Information and communication technology (ICT or IT for short) there were several character sets used depending of the number of bits the processor, that is the beating heart of your computer. They were just as specific as the language, normally called assembler, those chips were able to understand. There were mainframes in the 1970s using a character set of only six bits. Not even enough to handle uppercase, lowercase, numbers and enough interpunction. Just a subset of 64 characters.

ASCII since using seven or eight bits, depending on the system was an improvement to 128 or 256 possible symbols including control characters like linefeed, tab and so on. When we use search engines we typically make words with characters from this set of characters.

Without tools like compilers and/or interpreters (an assembler program is in fact one an exampleof the former) the machine still knows only zeroes and ones.

Our human languages are too complicated for them and if we're honest for ourselves as well. We may understand two or three of them well enough to speak, read and write as long as we use them in every day life. In many occasions like meeting someone from the far east if we are from the near west or of course the opposite we need a translator, preferably human, though computerized translating is improving thanks to sophisticated software, but really understanding they most likely never will. That would be a kind of Utopia.

UTF-8 is the most common way to help us to write in foreign language, even without knowing what it really means. The number of bits in use varies with the language. For English (provided you don't use foreign words containing diacritic signs) 7-bit characters might be sufficient. For Chinese we need at least two 8-bit bytes and languages like that are the reason to develop a universal standard and protocol to make understanding better from west to east, from north to south and back with all the differences in ideology, political, economic, cultural and/or religious views.

One of those ancient cultures used an alphabet called Ogham (explained in Italian) carved in stones.

We have so much in common, we are all humans, using the same kind of tools, bits, parts, vehicles, vessels and so on. Please let's focus on this to live and work together instead of pointing to where we're different than the others. We might come closer to Utopia.

Club Favolosa about ASCII, UTF-8 and more

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