-={ Saturday, 27 February 2016, 03:52:39 +1100 }=-

Hey Tony!

 TL> But when sis it become commonplace?

It depends on who you talk to.  Speaking for myself I only recently started
using it but was aware of utf-8 way back when.  I really never had a use for it
nor any of the 8-bit IBM ones, especially not CP437, that were all the rage
around that time.  ASCII still gets the major airtime up to and including
today.

 TL> I'm sure it was _much_ later.

For the Microsoft crowd for sure although there was talk for many, many, many
years the latest being that they recommend using utf-8 over everything else
including utf-16.

 TL> I was first nodelisted in the middle of 1992

Your name does look familiar.  Anyhow it is in the nodelist and I now have a
source for the daily one should there ever be a need in the future.  Also I now
have you down as LANG=en_AU.utf8 and TZ=Australia/Victoria in the database I
use for Fidonet messaging.  Looks good from this angle including the switches
DST  ST.

 TL> Yeah, Microsoft did lead the world up the gareden path regularly.

There is an understatement if I ever saw one before.  ;-)

 TL> I rest my case on vim. :)

Sure.  I believe the latest chatter in this echo revolved around vi vs. emacs. 
Given that vim is the flavour of vi most used since at least the late 1990's,
then by default vim wins over all things considered.  I am not sure where you
come down on that particular controversy.

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)