will be the only choice." Ten years later, in 2008, 50% of all the documents available on the internet were encoded in Unicode, with the other 50% encoded in ASCII. ASCII is still very useful, especially the original 7-bit plain ASCII, because it can be read, written, copied and printed by any text editor or word processor, and it is the only format compatible with 99% of all hardware and software. First published in January 1991, Unicode "provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language" (excerpt from the website). This double-byte platform-independent encoding provides a basis for the processing, storage and interchange of text data in any language, and any modern software and information technology protocols. Unicode is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, and is a component of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) specifications. = Language dictionaries Logos is an international translation company with headquarters in Modena, Italy. In 1997, Logos had 200 in-house translators in Modena and 2,500 free-lance translators worldwide, who processed around 200 texts per day. The company made a bold move, and decided to put on the web all the linguistic tools used by its translators, for the internet community to freely use them as well. The linguistic tools were the Logos Dictionary, a multilingual dictionary with 7 billion words (in fall 1998); the Logos Wordtheque, a multilingual library with 300 billion words extracted from translated novels, technical manuals and other texts; the Logos Linguistic Resources, a database of 500 glossaries; and the Logos Universal Conjugator, a database for verbs in 17 languages. When interviewed by Annie Kahn on December 7, 1997 for the French daily Le Monde, Rodrigo Vergara, head of Logos, explained: "We wanted all our translators to have access to the same translation tools. So we made them available on the internet, and while we were at it we decided to make the site open to the public. This made us extremely popular, and also gave us a lot of exposure. This move has in fact attracted many customers, and also allowed us to widen our network of translators, thanks to contacts made in the wake of the initiative."