Page "Unicode" Paragraph 8

The origins of Unicode date back to 1987, when Joe Becker from Xerox and Lee Collins and Mark Davis from Apple started investigating the practicalities of creating a universal character set.

In August 1988, Joe Becker published a draft proposal for an " international / multilingual text character encoding system, tentatively called Unicode ".

Although the term " Unicode " had previously been used for other purposes, such as the name of a programming language developed for the UNIVAC in the late 1950s, and most notably a universal telegraphic phrase-book that was first published in 1889, Becker may not have been aware of these earlier usages, and he explained that " he name ' Unicode ' is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding ".