> English uses 26 letters with no diacritics, compared to other languages like Chinese (thousands of characters), Hindi (50+ letters), or French/German (latin with diacritics).

The English language has diacritics (see words like naïve, façade, résumé, or café). It's just that the English language uses them so rarely that they are largely dropped in any context where they are hard to introduce. Note that this adaptation to lack-of-diacritic can be found in other Latin script languages: French similarly is prone to loss-of-diacritic (especially in capital letters), whereas German has alternative spelling rules (e.g., Schroedinger instead of Schrödinger).

The same applies to why China had all the building blocks (pun intended) of the printing press but it was perfected by Gutenberg in Europe, where the number of glyphs was much more manageable.

Computer character codes descended directly from pre-computer codes, either teletype or punched card. The advantage holds back through printing to writing itself; having a small, fixed set of glyphs that can represent anything is just better.

We got lots done with 6-bit pre-ASCII encodings, actually, like CDC Display Code and Univac's Fieldata. It's more than enough for 26 letters, 10 digits, and lots of punctuation. And there are faint echoes of these early character sets remaining in ASCII -- a zero byte is ^@, for example, because @ was the zero-valued Fieldata "master space" character, which distinguished EXEC 8 control cards from source code and data cards.

There must be some alternate universe where WWII never happened, all the talented Hungarian and Polish mathematicians, logicians etc. stayed home, and computer parts and applications carry names like Emlékezet or Wrzeszcz.

>early character encodings like 7-bit ASCII

early character encoding was 6-bit ASCII, no lower case

Spanish isn't much bigger...

"UTF-8 was first officially presented at the USENIX conference in San Diego, from January 25 to 29, 1993" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8)

Hey team, we're working to release an ambitious new operating system in about 6 months, but I've decided we should burn the midnight oil to rip out and redo all of the text handling we worked on to replace it with something that was just introduced at a conference..

Oh and all the folks building their software against the beta for the last few months, well they knew what they were getting themselves into, after all it is a beta (https://books.google.com/books?id=elEEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA1#v=onep...)

As for Windows XP, so now we're going to add a third version of the A/W APIs?

More background: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190830-00/?p=10...

The history is more complicated than that. Originally, ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode were two separate efforts, with only ISO having 31-ish-bit ideas, and Unicode being strictly 16 bits [0][1]. UTF-8 as in TFA was clearly developed to cover the 31-bit ISO character collection, the encoding going up to 6 bytes per character, although a couple of years later this was restricted to the 4 bytes sufficient to cover the 20 bits of Unicode 2.0 (1996). The initial UTF-8 development is therefore somewhat beyond the scope of what Unicode 1.x was about at the time.

Furthermore, the development of Windows NT already began in 1989 (then planned as OS/2 3.0) and proceeded in parallel to the finalization of Unicode 1.0, and to its eventual adoption by ISO that lead to Unicode 1.1 and ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993. It was natural to adopt that standardization effort.

Once established, the 16-bit encoding used by Windows NT was engrained in kernel and userspace APIs, notably the BSTR string type used by Visual Basic and COM, and importantly in NTFS. Adopting UTF-8 for Windows XP would have provided little benefit at that point, while causing a lot of complications. For backwards compatibility, something like WTF-8 would effectively have been required, and there would have been an additional performance penalty for converting back and forth from the existing WCHAR/BSTR APIs and serializations. It wasn't remotely a viable opportunity for such a far-reaching change.

Lastly, my recollection is that UTF-8 only became really widespread on the web some time after the release of Windows XP (2001), maybe roughly around Vista.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Coded_Character_Set#...

[1] "Internationalization and character set standards", September 1993, https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/174683.174687

Windows using CP-125X encodings by default in many countries instead of a UTF-8 did a lot of damage, at least in my experience.

Can't imagine they would've wanted to change encoding between Win3.1 and NT3.1.

And nowadays developers have to deal with the "A/W" suffix bullshit.

They pretty much got their wish, bytes 5 and 6 are gone, along with half of byte 4!

The RFC that restricted it: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3629#page-11

A UTF-8 playground: https://utf8-playground.netlify.app/