h-speaking, compared with only 5% five years ago.
Isn't that great?"

The internet did pass this second milestone in summer 2000,
with non-English-speaking users reaching 50%. As shown in the
statistics of Global Reach, they were 52.5% in summer 2001, 57%
in December 2001, 59.8% in April 2002, 64.4% in September 2003
(with 34.9% non-English-speaking Europeans and 29.4% Asians),
and 64.2% in March 2004 (with 37.9% non-English-speaking
Europeans and 33% Asians).

= From ASCII to Unicode

Used since the beginning of computing, ASCII (American Standard
Code for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit coded character
set for information interchange in English. It was published in
1968 by ANSI (American National Standards Institute), with an
update in 1977 and 1986. The 7-bit plain ASCII, also called
Plain Vanilla ASCII, is a set of 128 characters with 95
printable unaccented characters (A-Z, a-z, numbers, punctuation
and basic symbols), i.e. the ones that are available on the
English/American keyboard.

With the use of other European languages, extensions of ASCII
(also called ISO-8859 or ISO-Latin) were created as sets of 256
characters to add accented characters as found in French,
Spanish and German, for example ISO 8859-1 (ISO-Latin-1) for
French.

Yoshi Mikami, who lives in Fujisawa, Japan, launched the
bilingual (Japanese, English) website "The Languages of the
World by Computers and the Internet", also known as Logos Home
Page or Kotoba Home Page, in late 1995. Yoshi was the co-author
(with Kenji Sekine and Nobutoshi Kohara) of "The Multilingual
Web Guide" (Japanese edition), a print book published by
O'Reilly Japan in August 1997, and translated in 1998 into
English, French and German.

Yoshi Mikami explained in December 1998: "My native tongue is
Japanese. Because I had my graduate education in the U.S. and
worked in the computer business, I became bilingual in Japanese
and American English. I was always interested in languages and
different cultures, so I learned some Russian, French and
Chinese along the way. In late 1995, I created on the web The
Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet and tried
to summarize there the brief history, linguistic and phonetic
features, writing system and computer processing aspects for
each of the six major languages of the world, in English and
Japanese. As I gained more experience, I invited my two
associates to help me write a book on viewing, understanding