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>Soften it a little and consider IBM (I believe: Len? Michael?) who were building a precursor to what would eventually become the foundations of Latin-1. Right down somewhere near the bottom right-hand corner came the ÿ (yuml) character, which is used in French, and mostly in the names of some towns, but so rarely that even some French people are unaware of it, as I discovered when I asked some French LaTeX typesetters. I believe that the main influence on ECMA-72 which became Latin-1 which became iso-8859-1 was actually DEC Multinational, developed for the vt220 terminal; though a couple of characters were substituted. The way in which these decisions are made would be a fascinating study. I heard a tale that the IBM PC keyboard layout was dreamt up by a fairly junior engineer with no knowledge either of the years of effort to standardise keyboard layouts or of the extensive ergonomic and usability studies designed to maximize the performance of keyboard users. The resulting lost productivity must be costing us billions. But then, someone has to decide. The Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans had been arguing for years about how to code ideographic characters, and in the end Xerox and a few Californian friends decided to tell them the answer. My friends in Japan told me they did such a bad job that it would never catch on, but they made the same mistake I have so often made myself - bad things do catch on. Michael Kay Saxonica
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