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=== {{anchor|Unicode 88}}History ===
The origins of Unicode can be traced back to the 1980s, to a group of individuals with connections to [[Xerox]]'s [[Xerox Character Code Standard|Character Code Standard]] (XCCS).<ref name="unicode-88" /> In 1987, Xerox employee [[Joe Becker (Unicode)|Joe Becker]], along with [[Apple Inc.|Apple]] employees [[Lee Collins (Unicode)|Lee Collins]] and [[Mark Davis (Unicode)|Mark Davis]], started investigating the practicalities of creating a universal character set.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Summary Narrative |url=https://www.unicode.org/history/summary.html |website=Unicode |date=August 31, 2006 |access-date=15 March 2010}}</ref> With additional input from Peter Fenwick and [[Dave Opstad]],<ref name="unicode-88" /> Becker published a draft proposal for an "international/multilingual text character encoding system in August 1988, tentatively called Unicode". He explained that "the name 'Unicode' is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding".<ref name="unicode-88">{{Cite web |last=Becker |first=Joseph D. |author-link=Joseph D. Becker |date=10 September 1998 |title=Unicode 88 |url=https://unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161125224409/https://unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf |archive-date=25 November 2016 |access-date=25 October 2016 |publisher=[[Unicode Consortium]] |quote=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 that has been maintained by Xerox as an internal corporate standard since 1982, through the efforts of Ed Smura, Ron Pellar, and others.<br />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 (Unicode)|Lee Collins]] (ideographic character unification). Unicode retains the many features of XCCS whose utility has been proved over the years in an international line of communication multilingual system products. |orig-year=1988-08-29}}</ref>
In this document, entitled ''Unicode 88'', Becker outlined a scheme using [[16-bit computing|16-bit]] characters:<ref name="unicode-88" />
<blockquote>
Unicode is intended to address the need for a workable, reliable world text encoding. Unicode could be roughly described as "wide-body [[ASCII]]" that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the world's living languages. In a properly engineered design, 16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose.
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
In early 1989, the Unicode working group expanded to include Ken Whistler and Mike Kernaghan of Metaphor, Karen Smith-Yoshimura and Joan Aliprand of [[Research Libraries Group]], and Glenn Wright of [[Sun Microsystems]]. In 1990, Michel Suignard and Asmus Freytag of [[Microsoft]] and [[NeXT]]'s Rick McGowan had also joined the group. By the end of 1990, most of the work of remapping existing standards had been completed, and a final review draft of Unicode was ready.
The [[Unicode Consortium]] was incorporated in California on 3 January 1991,<ref>{{Cite web |title=History of Unicode Release and Publication Dates |url=https://unicode.org/history/publicationdates.html |access-date=20 March 2023 |website=Unicode}}</ref> and the first volume of ''The Unicode Standard'' was published that October. The second volume, now adding Han ideographs, was published in June 1992.
In 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. This increased the Unicode codespace to over a million code points, which allowed for the encoding of many historic scripts, such as [[Egyptian hieroglyphs]], and thousands of rarely used or obsolete characters that had not been anticipated for inclusion in the standard. Among these characters are various rarely used [[CJK characters]]—manycharacters—many mainly being used in proper names, making them far more necessary for a universal encoding than the original Unicode architecture envisioned.<ref name="unicoderevisited">{{Cite web |last=Searle |first=Stephen J |title=Unicode Revisited |url=http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/unicoderevisited.html |access-date=18 January 2013}}</ref>
Version 1.0 of Microsoft's TrueType specification, published in 1992, used the name "Apple Unicode" instead of "Unicode" for the Platform ID in the naming table.
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