kaleidoscope

In the  previous post , we saw how ASCII evolved and how useful it was for communication among different devices. With ASCII, the same decimal numbers 0-127 were mapped to the same printable characters and control codes, across all computers and peripherals , creating uniformity. The Problem ASCII was powerful but it was limited to English. It would have worked, If Britain was the only colonial power in the world. Unfortunately, western greed was prevalent in early modern history. Many other European countries like France, Spain, Portugal, Netherland, Germany, and a few more, claimed many other parts of the world as colonies. This led to having,  French ,  Spanish ,  Portuguese,  and a few more European languages as the lingua franca in a large part of the world. On top of it, there were some countries like China, Japan, Iran, Russia & few more, which were either not colonized or not completely influenced by the west, and were still using their languages, li...

In software engineering, we often encounter the terms,  UNICODE ,  UTF-8 ,  Base64 ,  ISO-8859–1, and ASCII . Somehow its tough to find out a clear explanition about them.  In this 4 posts series, I’ll try to provide a “simplified” explanation of what these terms are and an over-simplified history of, how did we get where we are today. Background Humans, reply on graphical characters to represent  data & operations . For  example , language letters (A, a, B, b, C, c, etc.), numbers (1,2,3, etc), operations (+, -, ÷, etc), actions (carriage return, etc), and let's not forget the emojis (😀, 🥸, etc) and much more. However, computers can’t understand these characters. Computer processors are made up of logic gates having only two states, ON and OFF. Coincidentally ( not really ),  the binary number system  is comprised of only two symbols 1 and 0, those can be interpreted as ON and OFF state of logic gates in computers. Therefore, its easy ...