The most recent development [in 1998] is Unicode. Although still evolving and only just being incorporated into the latest software, this new coding system translates each character into 16 bits. Whereas 8-bit extended ASCII could only handle a maximum of 256 characters, Unicode can handle over 65,000 unique characters and therefore potentially accommodate all of the world's writing systems on the computer. So now the tools are more or less in place. They are still not perfect, but at last we can surf the web in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and numerous other languages that don't use the Western alphabet. As the internet spreads to parts of the world where English is rarely used -- such as China, for example, it is natural that Chinese, and not English, will be the preferred choice for interacting with it. For the majority of the users in China, their mother tongue will be the only choice." 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. Unicode is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, with its variants UTF- 8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 (UTF: Unicode Transformation Format), and is a component of the specifications of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Unicode has replaced ASCII for text files on Windows platforms since 1998. Unicode surpassed ASCII on the internet in December 2007. 1992 > HOMES FOR ELECTRONIC TEXTS [Summary] The first homes for electronic texts were the Etext Archives, founded in 1992 by Paul Southworth, and the E-Zine-List, founded in 1993 by John Labovitz, among others. The first electronic texts were mostly political. They were followed by electronic zines also covering cultural topics, and not targeted towards a mass audience, at least during the first years. The Etext Archives, hosted on the website of the University of Michigan, were "home to electronic texts of all kinds, from the sacred to the profane, and from the political to the personal", without judging their content. The E-Zine-List was a directory of e-zines around the world, accessible via FTP, gopher, email, the web and other services. The list was updated monthly. 3,045 zines were listed in November 1998. John wrote on its website: "Now the e-zine world is different. (…) Even the term 'e-zine' has been co-opted by the commercial world, and has come to mean nearly any type of publication distributed electronically. Yet there is still the original, independent fringe, who continue to publish from their heart, or push the boundaries of what we call a 'zine'." *** The first homes for electronic texts were the Etext Archives, founded in 1992 by Paul Southworth, and the E-Zine-List, founded in 1993 by John Labovitz, among others.