Your take on the typical KZfaq video is depressingly accurate

Has Unicode added a character for the "Cool S" yet? I feel like that's a crucial piece of historical iconography that definitely needs to be included!

One of my favorite parts of Unicode and emoji is that there's a sort of "glue" character that can be used to alter or modify an already existing emoji. It allows people to specify a skin color for emojis of people, and the pride flag is basically "basic flag emoji + glue + rainbow". It's just such a neat trick that the Unicode people used to greatly increase the range of emoji that can be supported.

When I worked at a national wildlife refuge, we made maps in ArcGIS to hand out to people who wanted to bird watch. We'd mark spots where you could see cranes, eagles, ducks, etc. ArcGIS doesn't easily allow for images to be imported into a map, so we used a bird font. I forget exactly what letter corresponded to what bird but it made labelling bird watching locations super easy. 😂

As a developer I’m familiar with ASCII and Unicode but this was still very informative and entertaining video. Keep up the good work and Thanks!

That Ron/Don/ducks bit was absolute gold. Great job with this and all your videos! Its been exciting to see your trajectory from Fake Science into Vox and now your solo adventures!

Repeatedly hearing the letter "Ä" being called "A" gave my swedish ass an aneurysm, even though i know he's not wrong and that the point being made is that you can add diacritics like an umlaut/diaeresis to letters using unicode.

I am a Chinese speaker and I am learning Japanese. I know the hiragana and katagana pretty well but sometimes I don't know the pronunciation of a kanji. I would just switch to Chinese and type the Chinese equivalent and I am always surprised how it knows it is supposed to be a Japanese kanji not a Chinese character. Turns out someone (probably a group of people) painstakingly found out every single Japanese kanji that is exactly the same as their Chinese counterpart and made them the same unicode!

Honestly, the production quality of your videos makes me feel like i'm watching Netflix, it's pristine! And i find it incredible that even with the fancy edits and topics you can still make it entertaining and funny!

I know you didn't want to get too technical, but UTF-8 had a big effect on Unicode's adoption. ASCII used 7 or 8 bits of data, while the earliest Unicode standards used 16. But for ASCII text (which includes, say, the HTML that makes up every web page, even in non-Latin languages), half the data would just be a bunch of zeroes. If they wanted to include more that ~65,000 characters, they'd have to extend it to 32-bits, and a full three quarters of plain Latin text would be zeroes. This would suck even now, but in an age of dialup modems, it was a non-starter. UTF-8 allows us to vary the number of bits for each character: 8, 16. 24, and 32, or even more if we include combining characters that allow you to change the color of hair on an emoji character.

As a computer geek this video tickles me nicely. We deal with unicode and it's weirdness as software developers all the time. It's nice for the general public to understand why sometimes we have this weirdness.

I have a vague recollection of reading somewhere that that the addition of Egyptian Hieroglyphs to unicode was a pretty significant step in Egyptological research as it helped simplify communication in research (referring to hieroglyphs in writing in a shared, standardized way) I have a hard time finding the article I read, so perhaps my memory is off, but that’s what I remember 😅

LOL who remembers receiving text messages with a bunch of squares thinking what is wrong with my phone.

Learning Unicode's history was never this fun, and made me realize it's importance. Also, I genuinely love your style and take on video essays like this. Must've taken some time to reach that balance.

I remember Ron and Don's issue well. In the 1980s, I was using a Unix computer that used Ascii for its characters and I had to produce a tape of W-2 data for the IRS which had to be in EBCDIC which is the code that was used by IBM. I had to use the dd ommand to convert the text and write it to tape and produce a file that the IRS would accept. For some reason, it took a lot of work to get it to work right. The other similar issue was that Unix used linefeed to terminate text lines and both VAX/VMS and the new PC's used carriage return/linefeed combinations. Transferring files had to take that into account.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, when browsers did not fully support Unicode yet, non-English speakers had to adapt to writing without special chacterters. This was the beginning of a kind of "dialects" initially intended to circumvent that technical limitations, but quickly became youth slang (and the terror of many teachers and parents).

great editing as always Mr. Edwards. Thank you for your work, quite entertaining.

Convo between Ron and Don made me sub!

Thank you for making your videos so enjoyable beyond just the information you give us... it looks like you have fun making them, and that's fun to watch!

Crazy that this is a single character ﷽

I find it interesting that there is actually a common language (of sorts) that Unicode doesn't fully support: Math expressions. A format called Latex is much more common in math equation setting, and while Unicode does have some stuff for this, its not nearly as good.

I'm a very technical guy who is not afraid of using the command line and it's text-based applications. Having Unicode there is very useful if you want things to be more useful or just to be more beautiful. Also, I learn Japanese using the internet, which is now possible due to Unicode. Well made video, ありがとうございます！

excellent quality as always Phil

This is a phenomenal video! Loved every second of it!

What I learned from this video- Unicode reaches back into the 80’s, and that they tried to cap it 16 bits by limiting the CJK glyphs.

i feel so ꧁ special ꧂ as someone who has captions on hehe, i enjoyed that lil message ☆✪ൠ

Okay I legitimately blurted out laughing when the B&W guy asked if he could leave after his segment was over. 😂 You keep coming up with great ways of playing with tropes of educational videos. I immediately imagined all talking head interviewees as being trapped in the video, waiting to be cut to again. You’re killing it, Phil! Best video on this topic I have ever seen.

Another solid video Phil!

Wow, the visuals and the storytelling are amazing

The humor in this video is on point! A super interesting video, yet entertaining as well. Great job with this one, Phil!

𓂸

always interested in your content, feels like curiosity at its peak

Thank you for posting!

This answered questions I never knew I had. I'm a computer tinkerer/novice programmer, so I was already somewhat familiar with what ASCII & Unicode are, but never knew the history behind them. Thank you for this entertaining educational video!

hell yeah !! i love unicode !! finally a look into its history !!

Enjoyed this video Phil

I never loved history but the way you tell the stories make me like it ever so little more. Thank you!

The spoofs of 90s VHS presentations and modern overhyped KZfaqrs were great. I can tell how much effort went into framing, scripting, and then the chroma key background creation (more involved for the former admittedly).

thanks for covering this :) I asked you in a tweet a while back and thanks so much for the video

Awesome videos, super informative

This video is 𓎼𓂋𓄿𓏏.

The humor in this video is on another level Great video as always Phil, thanks!

Cool stuff!

1:35 shots fired at Scishow! 💀

I'm glad I'm not the only one who find it fun to look at unicode characters

i didn't expect to wake up to find a history of unicode video in my feed, let alone from someone i enjoy as much as you, Phil. let the breakfast, and history, begin

Love your videos. Not too in depth, long and dry videos but also not too superficial and surface level.

This video was good at showing social impacts which I hadn't seen featured before. Thank you.

You forgot about m̶̢̓̒o̸̼͊͜͠d̶̪͌i̵͙͚͠f̴͍͎̄ȉ̸̡ė̸͕r̴̨͛̎ ̴̣͘ͅc̴̲͘h̴̙̿a̷̹͛̑r̸̫̈́ͅa̸̳̚c̵̣̑ͅt̸̳̀͝e̵͉̍͜r̸͕̤̒s̸̱̣̓!

Some of these unicodes are so high-quality & interesting ngl.

This was super interesting. All your videos are. They just should be a little longer. They always leave me wanting more.

This is amazing! I just attended the funeral of one Jon Jenkins, who was one of the key Unicode engineers who worked for Apple over many years, and was a key worker who helped with Chinese characters and other alphabets, idk this stuff just really intrigues me.

The level of ASCII usage will fall off a cliff now that Dwarf Fortress has been ported to Steam.

That HAI mention in the beginning! 🤩

Great vid. This made me look into what a Japanese typewriter looked like and Wow! The technical expertise it must have taken to use those things. Makes the QWERTY evolution seem tame.

I'm always down to listen to a boring 30 minute video by "The Computer Guru" while I make my spaghetti

Insisting that every Han character gets it's own code point by itself: *Han Solo* (Queue Wookiee sound.) Thank you. I'll show myself out.

I can tell you’re finding your groove with every new video. In my opinion this topic isn’t all that interesting but your delivery was really funny and entertaining. And I still learned something so congrats!

7:06 As a Chinese user, I think those are still very much the same Chinese characters. So I don't think anyone would oppose these characters on a practical standpoint. Han Chars Unification also deals with more visible differences where the good examples are listed on Wikipedia. As for the hieroglyphics, I haven't checked, but I assume these are added for research purposes. How else would you do a text search on ancient Egyptian writings if there isn't a standard?

Some people opposed the Han unification back then but as a Japanese person I would say the majority of us, including I, think it was a sensible thing to do. But it was not a simple task, was not executed perfectly, and left some irreversible inconsistencies in the code chart - like the fact that the character 浅 is defined so it can be drawn with two or three horizontal bars in the right‐hand part while 桟 and 栈 are encoded separately. Overall it more or less worked. It is hard to come up with a Latin alphabet equivalent but it is like an alternate universe where one half of the world would end up having a tradition of writing the letter A consistently without a horizontal bar, while the other half would exclusively use the A with two horizontal bars to write their own languages for centuries. Both evolved from the same letter A, but for each sides “the other version” would just look weird and alien. And it’s not just the letter A but many of the alphabet throughout would have such small differences, some because of natural evolution, some due to countries decided to purposefully modify their writing system. They speak different languages so texts written in one region using their version of the alphabet rarely meet the eyes of others, never normalizing wide variations within each regions. (So for developers supporting East Asian languages it is important to not just translate the text but also make sure to apply appropriate fonts designed for each regions to look acceptable.)

Awesome vid! 🤗👍😁

Great editing, fitting music for the atmosphere, and your watch facing the camera for some reason kept me fixated. 9/10

That remind me of one shorts about Ao3 fun fact that there is someone posting fic written in hieroglyph. When i checked Ao3, i found something way crazier. There is fic written in fkn cuneiform. Like, HOW DO YOU EVEN TYPE THAT?! 💀

I appreciate the details you put into your youtuber spoof at 1:30. Abrasive colors, lighting, faces and cuts; just needed some face swirling and zooming.

Brilliant and well made as always Phil. Love your stuff at Vox and love your solo style and how it's you're own. By the way, has anyone ever mentioned you look so much like a younger Gary Oldman? Gary Not-So-Oldman? Also, are these KZfaq emoji also unicode based? Time to do my own resarch.

And here is another bit of unnecessary history: Baudot encoding was invented in the 1870s and was used in teleprinters. Letters were encoded in five bits, which only left room for capital letters. ASCII had seven bits, which allowed for lower case letters and more punctuation, but the first iteration only had upper case letters because that is what Baudot had. The Baudot ITA2 code, standardized in 1924, listed the letters in the order they appeared on the QWERTY keyboard. When the ASCII table was laid out they realized that the keyboard order no longer mattered, so the letters are in alphabetical order. In 1974 I worked at a company in Freeport, Texas. The blueprint printer I used was right next to the telex machine used to communicate with the company office in Houston. They would send us the daily schedules and we would send our production data back to them. When the telex received a message, in addition to printing it out, it would punch it out on paper tape, which was stored and could be printed out again. It was sort of the early version of the disk drive. The telex is pretty well gone now, but the Baudot code is still used in nautical radio messaging to conserve bandwidth. The big competitor to ASCII was EBCDIC, but I don't want to go into that right now, since it doesn't really bear on the development of Unicode.

Just starting the video now- but I’m so surprised, my TV even recognizes the symbols!

You're my new favorite channel

I would kill for that 90s style presentation that takes three hours of monotone narration over the meaning of every single symbol. you have no idea how badly I want it

Alt + 3 (in numpad) = ♥

Your videos never fail to entertain and educate!! Love em!

9:34 ^me sipping my mds sprite in bed wearing my bathrobe^ Ahhh yes, *we* did good.

I've always been interested in this kinda stuff

There's also precedent because some of the earliest word processors felt it was important to be able to write chess books

Very nice

Awesome Subscribed!!!!

If you can please explore more of the big bumps in that chart of upticks in characters what were they adding at that points. What did the code look like before han characters were added. What was the romantic languages how many characters did they fill up. What languages got supported in which order. Discuss about the emoji take over in more detail. Fascinating topic reminds me w bit of the helvetica documentary my art class showed.

The ever-growing inclusivity of Unicode makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside and hopeful for the future.

"Sometimes a solution looks like a foot" - likely the most confusing quote without context.

As someone who is pretty familiar with Unicode and has kind of gotten over its wonder, I enjoyed you introducing unicode to stranger things music

In one of his live talks, Tom Scott says that the watershed moment was when a version of ASCII included a smiley face.

haha such a great 🖌🖌🖌 video

The Calvin peeing video + the "Ron, Don, Ron, Don" joke got me subscribed :)

I had no idea so much work went into the new emoji releases

Why is fire so fire indeed.

6:53 I wouldn’t say “A” and “Á” is a good example… Maybe “A” and “𝐀”? But in a world where the second 𝐀 is the only acceptable form of A in certain countries. (I know, weird, but there are no actual examples for this.) Imagine being used to only seeing 𝐀 in your day-to-day life, and then suddenly it gets rendered as “A”. You’d still recognise it, but you’d think it looks distinctly foreign. The same goes for Han characters such as 八. The font is the only thing that can determine a character’s “regional” look. Now imagine a Chinese text displayed with a Japanese font. All the characters would stay legible to a Chinese audience, but many of them will look Japanese.

Thank you for calling out how obnoxious some KZfaq videos can be at the beginning

Hey, new subscriber, love the channel , it's unique information framed as curious adventure showing an appreciation in the every day, I hope it sparks a similar mind in me.

Wonderful birthday gift to get a video!

I love internet protocols, I studied and implemented a bunch in university and I think I'll try to implement my own ascii and unicode interpreter, should be hard enough for unemployed ol' me

holy banger

New graphics are really shaping up dude. Every video is better and better

01:56 In graphic design, they are more precisely called typefaces. Fonts are flavours: bold, italics, narrow and so on.

I do wonder if there'll be unicode for Elfic or other fantasy alphabets in the future

One reason why the scripts of extinct languages like the hieroglyphics were added is science. Archeologists, anthropologists, linguists, ethnologists, historians, etc. all need a way to digitally write whatever was written in a piece of clay, or rock or papyrus that they have found. This is still actually an ongoing problem for them. Like what Unicode did with Han Unification, Unicode also combined the different time periods of these ancient scripts. Ideally there should have been different sets of code points for sets of hieroglyphics that came from different periods of time but Unicode also unified those code points. So like with Han Unification where there should be distinct Japanese, or Korean or Chinese fonts just to distinguish what each code point truly represents, that too became the reality for hieroglyphics and other writing systems. They needed different fonts for different periods of time. What Unicode did is self-defeating. Our computers today are powerful enough to render up to millions of code points, not just the over 140,000 they currently have today. Why not do away with these unification and assign every character from every dialect and time period a code point, making none of us rely on installing distinct fonts just to display what the code point represents accurately.

The KZfaq satire you made is as fire as fire.

🎉

Man you are really on fire in this one. Your comedy bits are hilarious! Also, have you got a new lens or something? Your talking head shot looks great

Phil’s alter egos are becoming the best part of this channel. Laughed my ass off at 1960s Phil 😹

they didn't add it all for no reason, study egyptian hieroglyphs and write in english with them using their phonetic values and as ideograms