-={ vendredi, 26 février 2016, 01:02:26 +0000 }=-

Hey Tony!

 TL> 2008 is still "very recent" compared to BBS software. :)

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8, and I quote;

  UTF-8 was first officially presented at the USENIX conference in San
  Diego, from January 25 to 29, 1993.

Speaking for myself, I am not sure what year I was writing C based BBS software
but probably around that year.  However it wsa aimed at DOS and not any Unice
so I have a very good excuse for not encorporating utf-8.  Also back then I
didn't have a nodelisted Fidonet BBS until 1995-ish and that never survived all
that long as users were already becoming hard to come by and I decided that I
could do everything I required from Fidonet without a BBS.  Now I am nodelisted
simply because I am the only native Linux Fidonet app author I am aware of that
provides working utf-8 apps that can be readily deployed at will.

 TL> I know by 2008-2009, I was having to deal with UTF-16,

That sounds about right.  One of the many big mistakes engineered by the good
folks at Microsoft.  Seems to me that they quickly realized that they should
have made the investment in utf-8 instead and even admitted as much.

I have utf-16 compatible libraries kicking around but have never actually used
them.  Also it seems to me that gptfdisk can handle utf-16 labels if compiled
with the proper dependencies onboard.  Again I have never actually tried this
as I have been happy with ASCII labels since way back when.

 TL> I'm sure vi has also been constantly updated to meet the needs

According to the main site, ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/unix/;

  -rw-r--r--    1 506      450       9843297 Aug 10  2013 vim-7.4.tar.bz2

That is the most recent source release and happens to be the version I am
currently using.  The oldest version on that site happens to be;

  -rw-rw-r--    1 506      450        468153 Mar 05  1996 vim-3.0.tar.gz

I am not sure that is the first vim I ever used.  I think I may have been using
elvis on my first linux systems but please don't quote me on that.

Life is good,
Maurice

... Don't cry for me I have vi.
--- GNU bash, version 4.3.42(1)-release (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu)