Unicode: 65,536 Possibilities

A consortium of heavyweight computer industry companies, including IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems, is sponsoring the development of Unicode, a uniform 16-bit encoding system. Unicode will enable computers and applications to talk to one another more easily and will accommodate most languages of the world (including Hebrew, Japanese if, and upper- and lower-case Greek i|i). ASCII, with 128 (27) character codes, is sufficient for the English language but falls far short of the Japanese language requirements. Unicode's 16-bit code allows for 65,536 characters (216). The consortium is proposing that Unicode be adopted as a standard for information interchange throughout the global computer community. Universal acceptance of the Unicode standard would help facilitate international communication in all areas, from monetary transfers between banks to e-mail. With Unicode as a standard, software could be created more easily to work with a wider base of languages.
Unicode, like any advancement in computer technology, presents conversion problems.
The 16-bit Unicode demands more memory than do traditional 8-bit codes. An A in Unicode takes twice the RAM and disk space of an ASCII A. Currently, 8-bit encoding systems provide the foundation for most software packages and existing databases. Should Unicode be adopted as a standard, programs would have to be revised to work with Unicode, and existing data would need to be converted to Unicode. Information processing needs have simply outgrown the 8-bit standard, so conversion to Unicode or some other standard is inevitable. This conversion, however, will be time-consuming and expensive.Creating text for a video display calls for a technology called "character generation." An 8-bit encoding system, with its 256 unique bit configurations, is more than adequate to represent all of the alphanumeric characters used in the English language. The Chinese, however, need a 16-bit encoding system, like Unicode, to represent their 13,000 characters. .