>A lot of this stuff was still relatively new, and only a few people
were thinking of non-European or non-Latin-alphabet languages.
I don't think that's true. Vast numbers of people were thinking about
them, but they weren't in California, and no-one in California took any
notice. Before the internet, the level of ignorance in the US about
anything happening outside the US was staggering. The amazing thing is
that HTTP/HTML ever made it across from Switzerland.
(Just consider: why did Microsoft, for many years, refer to Latin-1 as
"ANSI"? Answer: because that's what it said on the cover of the copy
that they acquired. ISO standards in those days were published in the US
with an ANSI rebranding. Microsoft were not only ignorant that it was an
international standard rather than an American one, they were also
clearly unaware that there were zillions of other ANSI standards.)
Michael Kay
Saxonica
