UTF-8 was designed one night in a diner in New Jersey by Ken Thompson. Rob Pike's account of this historical moment can be found at:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt

I just can't help admiring these get-it-right-the-first-time kind of guys.

Georg Wrede wrote:
> UTF-8 was designed one night in a diner in New Jersey by Ken Thompson. Rob Pike's account of this historical moment can be found at:
> 
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt
> 
> I just can't help admiring these get-it-right-the-first-time kind of guys.
> 

Me too.  Given the level of complexity of the Unicode standard to begin with, the design of UTF-8 is so elegant and humble in it's way, that it's almost hard to imagine it being designed, except by one or maybe two brilliant people.

My gut tells me that if you had to get buy-in from ten people in a development meeting, you couldn't ever get something like this off the ground.

I can't explain exactly why I think this is true.  I would not have guessed it before working in a real development lab, even though most of the people that I've worked with seem to be bright and dedicated folks.

Kevin