Unicode History
A chronological exploration of how Unicode transformed global digital communication.
Unicode Consortium Founded
Xerox and Apple engineers formed the Unicode Consortium to standardize global character encoding and solve multilingual computing challenges.
Unicode 1.0 Released
Launched with 7,188 characters, providing a foundation for supporting 200+ writing systems across 50+ languages.
Adoption by Major Platforms
UTF-8 became the default encoding for major OSes (Windows, Linux) and web standards (HTML5), cementing Unicode as the global standard.
Emoji Integration
Unicode added emoji characters through collaboration with Apple, Google, and other platform vendors, standardizing emoji as a core communication medium.
Unicode 16.0 Released
Added 5,128 new characters, including regional symbols, symbols for artificial intelligence, and expanded emoji diversity.
Global Impact
300+
Languages officially supported
150,000+
Characters in Unicode 16.0
98%
Websites using UTF-8 encoding
Explore More
Dive deeper into Unicode's technical evolution or see how it powers modern digital communication.