Re: OT: Semi-OT: Unicode keyboard

On Fri, 6 Aug 2004 14:58:52 +0200, Carsten Becker
<post@...> wrote:
> I tried to install that file, but the setup program doesn't work for my
> ancient Win98SE  driven computer. Like the MSKLC, the installer only
> seems to work for >=Win2000. And this is exactly what I hate: Microsoft
> declared everything under Win2000 out-of-date and new programs only run
> on >=Win2000 so that everyone MUST buy 2000 or XP or die.
Win98SE is based on 8-bit character sets. Windows NT is based on
Unicode, but uses UCS-2 internally - not UTF-16, which means that it
can only access the BMP of Unicode.

I believe Windows 2000 is the first Windows OS that has access to
other planes of Unicode besides the BMP; this may be part of the
reason why such programs do not work on earlier releases of Windows.

Doing Unicode on Windows 9x is simply not well supported by the
operating system; there are very few programs that do it, and I
imagine each one implements its own routines. (The only programs I can
think of that can handle Unicode text on Windows 9x are some web
browsers and Word >= 97. Which is one of the reasons why I bought Word
97 back when I was using Windows 95.)

So even if the keyboard driver magically did work on Windows 98, it
wouldn't be of much use since most programs cannot accept Unicode
input; I imagine you'd get raw UTF-16, if anything.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>