Subject: Re: Unicode/10646 History (was Re: [idn] An ignorant question about TC<-> SC)

From: Kenneth Whistler <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2001 14:17:34 -0800 (PST)

Eric,

You asked:

> Since this is still of the form "people can judge for themselves",
> 
> Exactly who, from what group, was, in 1990, participating in the
> activity from SMI, and from IBM?

SMI? SMI Soft of Japan? smisoft.com SMI Corporation of Tulsa? smisoftware.com
Infineon Technologies? smi/siemens.com Surveyors Module International?
smi.com Nobody from any entity called SMI has ever been involved in the Unicode
Consortium, to the best of my knowledge.

From IBM: Isai Scheinberg of the IBM standards group in Toronto.
J.G. Van Stee, also of the IBM standards group, but based in
California. At the time, Jerry Andersen of IBM was chair of
X3L2, but was championing the old structure of 10646, in opposition
to the Unicode-inspired rewrite of DIS-1.

> 
> Again, in 1992, for DEC, SMI, and HP.

SMI, again, nobody. If you meant SGI, they didn't get involved
until later, and very marginally.

DEC: Avery Bishop -- working in the OS area, not printers.

HP: Mike Ksar -- standards. He had, of course, a background
in working on printers, but by 1992 was no longer doing so,
but was working just on standards.

--Ken

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From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2001 18:10:05 -0500

Ken,

SMI == Sun Microsystems. You have to find a person then in Building 5.
If you come up with someone other than John E. or myself, we'll be ...
surprised.

Hmm, not AIX dev at Locus, nor AIX dev in Austin, nor ACIS dev in Yorktown,
nor ACIS dev in PASC (me again, plus Austin).

Well, that's where os product was done. Not in Toronto. The right answer is
Gary Miller, Austin, but he'd give you the same answer I have. Another miss.
If the game was "What unit that did IBM's C compiler?", you'd get a point.

Mike wasn't in COSL. His group, along with Judy Chen, were on the opposite
side of the cafeteria from the operating systems people, though he was on
our cc distributions. His unit (corp-l10n) was being decimated when I was
at COSL. The right answer is (I can see his face ...) Larry ??? Yet another
miss.

I found my 1994 copy of the X/Open Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character
Set Coexistence and Migration, with its highlighted two critical lines in
section 1.2 that I used to advocate that we (Spec1170 participants, later
XPG/4.2, modernly "Unix") adopt FSS-UTF in the filesystem and character I/O
subsystems:

	Windows NT has these characteristics and is a prime example of a
	UCS system. Systems that do not have these characteristics are
	described as non-UCS systems.

I'll give you the DEC person, they were already tanking in '94, making a deal
with MicroSoft, and off the Unix standards stage.

This is fun. Keep swinging. Maybe you can prove that Unicode came from some
other venue than the printer bits of my clients, and I was simply to dull to
appreciate this higher truth. You'll need to show that the strategic and
technical managers I knew at SMI|IBM|HP had evil twins, but that shouldn't
be a problem.

Eric
Founder, X/Open; Principal Author, XPG/1
Founder, COSE; Co-Author, Spec1170, published as XPG/4.2

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From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2001 18:35:05 -0500

Dwyer. Larry Dwyer.