Timeline of ASCII History

Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail developed a system of electrical telegraphy that used a code consisting of dots and dashes to represent letters and numbers. This code, known as Morse code, was the first practical way to communicate over long distances using electrical signals. Morse code was initially used for transmitting messages over telegraph wires, but it was later adapted for use in radio communication as well. Morse code played an important role in the development of communication technology, it is not considered a digital character code, as it is based on analog signals rather than a binary code.

Émile Baudot, a French telegraph engineer, invented a five-bit binary code that allowed for the transmission of characters over telegraph lines. This code, known as Baudot code, was widely adopted for telegraphy and became the de facto standard for many years. Baudot code allowed for the transmission of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and some special characters. However, it was limited in its ability to represent non-Latin scripts and was eventually superseded by more advanced encoding standards like ASCII. Nevertheless, Baudot code paved the way for modern character encoding systems and played a crucial role in the development of modern communication technologies.

Bob Bemer, a computer programmer and engineer at IBM, submits a proposal to the ASA (American Standards Association) for a standard character encoding system for computers. Bemer's proposal, which is based on the 6-bit binary code used in the IBM 704 computer, includes provisions for uppercase and lowercase letters, digits, and special characters. Bemer's proposal is eventually incorporated into the ASCII standard, which is released two years later.

The American Standards Association (ASA) releases the first edition of the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) standard. The standard defines a set of 97 characters, including letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control codes, each represented by a 7-bit binary code. It was in many ways different from the ASCII in current use.

Artist and computer programmer Kenneth Knowlton creates a portrait of his wife, as well as several other images, using a technique he calls "computer drawing". The images are created using the limited character set of the IBM 7094 computer, and are considered to be among the earliest examples of what would later be known as ASCII art.

Revision of 1965 was an unpublished major revision. It looked a lot like the current ASCII, even though there were differences with certain characters. ASCII-1965 was accepted as a standard, but it went unpublished and unused.

The ASA (American Standards Association) releases the third revision of the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) standard. This was the version that eventually evolved to the ASCII we know today.

The ASCII standard receives a minor revision that does not change any of the graphic characters. The revised ASCII standard was known as "ASCII-1968" or "ANSI X3.4-1968".

On March 11, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs an executive order mandating that ASCII be adopted as a federal information processing standard for electronic data interchange (EDI) between federal agencies. This order, known as Executive Order 11110, required all federal agencies to use ASCII as the standard character encoding for information exchange, thus promoting interoperability and standardization across government systems.

The ASCII standard receives minor revision to fix some of ambiguities of ASCII-1967 and ASCII-1968. This revision also changed the definitions of several control characters. This updated ASCII standard is known as "ASCII-1977" or "ANSI X3.4-1977".

The introduction of extended ASCII, also known as 8-bit version, which added additional characters to the original ASCII character set, was introduced by IBM in 1981 for use in its first PC. Extended ASCII was introduced to provide a way to represent special characters, symbols, and foreign language characters that were not included in the original ASCII character set. The extended ASCII character set varied depending on the specific encoding. However, extended ASCII was not standardized, and different vendors used different encodings, which led to compatibility issues between systems.

Microsoft released the first version of Windows, which introduced character tables to support extended character sets beyond ASCII. However, the first version included only one character set, which was known as the Windows ANSI character set. Despite its name, Windows ANSI was not actually based on any published ANSI standard.

The ASCII standard receives an update to include a new set of control characters, known as the C0 and C1 control codes. The C0 control codes (0x00 to 0x1F) are the original ASCII control codes, while the C1 control codes (0x80 to 0x9F) are a set of additional control codes that were added to support international communication protocols. The updated ASCII standard with the C0 and C1 control codes is known as "ASCII-1986" or "ANSI X3.4-1986". However, the ASCII-1986 standard did not include any major changes to the existing character set, and it was eventually superseded by Unicode, which provides support for all writing systems and languages.

MS-DOS 3.3 was released, which added support for additional codepages beyond the original IBM PC character set. The added codepages included the Central European, Baltic, Turkish, and Greek codepages, among others. This allowed MS-DOS to display and process characters from more languages and regions than before.

Earliest documented use of the term “Unicode” which Joe Becker coined as the name of the new “unique, universal, and uniform character encoding.”

The Unicode Consortium is founded with the goal of creating a universal character encoding system that can represent all the characters used in any language or writing system in the world. The first version of the Unicode standard, which includes a total of 28,864 characters, is released in October of the same year. The Unicode standard is designed to be compatible with existing character encoding standards, including ASCII and extended ASCII, while also providing a means to represent characters that are not included in these standards.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standardizes the use of ASCII in email messages with the introduction of the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) standard.

The Unicode Consortium releases the second version of the Unicode standard, which includes a total of 38,887 characters. The new version adds support for additional scripts and writing systems, including Devanagari, Bengali, and Ethiopic, as well as additional symbols and emoji.

In July 14, the Unicode Consortium releases the fifth version of the Unicode standard, which includes a total of 99,187 characters. The new version adds support for additional scripts and writing systems, such as Tifinagh, Bamum, and Glagolitic, as well as additional symbols and emoji.

ASCII was the most common character encoding on the World Wide Web until December 2007, when UTF-8 encoding surpassed it.

The Unicode Consortium releases version 8.0 of the Unicode standard, which includes support for additional scripts and symbols, including several new emoji characters.

The Unicode Consortium releases version 10.0 of the Unicode standard, which includes support for new scripts and characters, as well as several new emoji characters.

The most recent version of the Unicode standard is version 15.0, which was released in September 2022. It includes support for new scripts and characters, as well as additional emoji characters.