This video provides an introduction to text encoding on computers, and outlines the history that led to the creation of the Unicode standard, and eventually, the famous UTF-8 text encoding.

"The History of UTF-8, as told by Rob Pike"
https://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utf-8_history

The puzzle game I made based on Hangul:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2090580/Matcha/
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/matcha/id1597044323

The original "Unicode 88" spec:https://unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf

Nic Barker

UTF-8 is a variable-width character encoding system that has become the dominant standard for text on the web. It achieves backward compatibility with ASCII by using the unused eighth bit to indicate multi-byte sequences, while maintaining self-synchronization through clever bit patterns that distinguish leading bytes from continuation bytes. The encoding can represent over 2 million code points using 1-4 bytes, with the number of leading ones in the first byte indicating the total length. This design allows UTF-8 to efficiently encode ASCII text in single bytes while supporting all Unicode characters, making it both space-efficient and universally compatible.

UTF-8, Explained Simply