Joe Becker (Unicode)

For other uses, see Joe Becker.

Joseph D. Becker is one of the co-founders of the Unicode project, and an Officer Emeritus of the Unicode Consortium. He has worked on artificial intelligence at BBN and multilingual workstation software at Xerox. He speaks survival-level Mandarin Chinese, French, German, Japanese, and Russian as well as English.[1] His Erdős number is 2.

Becker has long been involved in the issues of multilingual computing in general and Unicode in particular. His 1984 paper in Scientific American, "Multilingual Word Processing", was a seminal work on some of the problems involved, including the need to distinguish characters and glyphs.[2]

In 1987, Becker (then at Xerox), together with Lee Collins (also at Xerox) and Mark Davis of Apple began investigations into the practicality of creating a universal character set.[3] It was Becker who coined the word "Unicode" to cover the project.[4] His article Unicode 88,[5] contained the first public summary of the principles originally underlying the Unicode standard.

References

  1. ↑ http://www.unicodeconference.org/review-committee.htm
  2. ↑ http://www.sil.org/computing/routledge/simons/multilingual.html
  3. ↑ Summary Narrative of the History of Unicode
  4. ↑ http://unicode.org/history/earlyyears.html
  5. ↑ Becker, Joseph D. (1998-09-10) [1988-08-29]. "Unicode 88" (PDF). unicode.org (10th anniversary reprint ed.). Unicode Consortium. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2016-11-25. Retrieved 2016-10-25. In 1978, the initial proposal for a set of "Universal Signs" was made by Bob Belleville at Xerox PARC. Many persons contributed ideas to the development of a new encoding design. Beginning in 1980, these efforts evolved into the Xerox Character Code Standard (XCCS) by the present author, a multilingual encoding which has been maintained by Xerox as an internal corporate standard since 1982, through the efforts of Ed Smura, Ron Pellar, and others.
    Unicode arose as the result of eight years of working experience with XCCS. Its fundamental differences from XCCS were proposed by Peter Fenwick and Dave Opstad (pure 16-bit codes), and by Lee Collins (ideographic character unification). Unicode retains the many features of XCCS whose utility have been proved over the years in an international line of communication multilingual system products.
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