./anderson

In September 1992, Unicode had a problem on Unix. Storing characters as 16-bit values could introduce zero bytes that C programs mistook for string terminators. Earlier encodings had compatibility problems of their own. One evening, Ken Thompson and Rob Pike went to a diner in New Jersey. Thompson sketched a new encoding on a paper placemat. ASCII stayed exactly as it was. Other characters used multiple bytes, without accidentally introducing null bytes or Unix path separators. They went back to Bell Labs and started coding. By Friday, their Plan 9 operating system was running entirely on the new encoding. They called it UTF-8. Today, it powers over 99% of websites with known character encodings.