Unicode

The single catalogue assigning a number to every character of every script — the reason text survives the journey between machines.

Core Principles & Analysis

• Version 1.0 appeared in 1991 with 7,161 characters; the standard now exceeds 150,000.
• Its design point was unification: one encoding for all scripts, not one per language.
• Emoji are Unicode characters too, with their own committee, proposals and debates.