Tomorrow’s Tech Treepowered by Astra

File Formats & Standards · Recorded milestone

UTF-8 text encoding

Recorded year1992

Ken Thompson and Rob Pike design UTF-8, which stores every Unicode character while leaving plain ASCII unchanged; nearly all web pages now use it.

Explore this milestone on the interactive map

Built on

Led to

Sources & evidence

Dataset updated 2026-10-18. This individual record has not been separately re-reviewed.