There's an old engineering joke that says: “Standards are great … everyone should have one!” The problem is that – very often – everyone does. Consider the case of storing textual data inside a ...

There is no standard that says keyboards must map to something and it's up to the OS to interpret what each keycode means. The keycode sent out for the "Z" key on US English QWERTY style layouts may ...

My first real computer, an Amstrad CPC464, came with the robust Locomotive Basic in ROM, allowing the user to easily hack the hardware ASCII character set. This was awesome: all you had to do assign ...

Most readers will have at least some passing familiarity with the terms ‘Unicode’ and ‘UTF-8’, but what is really behind them? At their core they refer to character encoding schemes, also known as ...

You can use your computer's keyboard to quickly enter currency signs, foreign accents, trademarks and other symbols your business uses frequently. To access these symbols, you must use Windows' ...