Apple Computer Inc, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft Corp, Go Corp, Novell Inc, NeXT Inc, Metaphor Computer Systems and the Research Libraries Group have come together to form Unicode Inc in Mountain View, California to maintain and promote a new 16-bit multi-lingual text and character encoding standard Unicode. Unicode is intended to simplify development of international information systems by establishing a single uniform character standard encompassing all major languages, making multi-lingual software easier to write, information systems easier to manage and international data exchange more practical. The review draft standard contains over 27,000 characters and is being reviewed widely. The aim is an international standard as simple and efficient as ASCII. Xerox Corp was a major contributor to development.
