According to the CIA, 4.8% of the world's population speaks English as a native language and further references show 13% of the entire global population can speak English at one level or another [0]. For reference, the USA is 4.2% of the global population.
The real statement is that no one asked a few self-chosen individual who have never travelled beyond their own valley to ruin text handling in computers like the American Standard Code for Information Interchange has.
It seems unfortunate now, but I'd argue it was pretty reasonable at the time.
Unicode is the best attempt I know of to actually account for all of the various types of weirdness in every language on Earth. It's a huge and complex project, requiring a ton of resources at all levels, and generates a ton of confusion and edge cases, as we can see by various discussions in this whole comments section. Meanwhile, when all of the tech world was being built, computers were so slow and memory-constrained that it was considered quite reasonable to do things like represent years as 2 chars to save a little space. In a world like that, it seems like a bit much to ask anyone to spin up a project to properly account for every language in the world and figure out how to represent them and get the computers of the time to actually do it reasonably fast.
ASCII is a pretty ugly hack by any measure, but who could have made something actually better at the time? Not many individual projects could reasonably to more than try to tack on one or two other languages with more ugly hackery. Probably best to go with the English-only hack and kick the can down the road for a real solution.
I don't think anyone could have pulled together the resources to build Unicode until computers were effective and ubiquitous enough that people in all nations and cultures were clamoring to use them in their native languages, and computers would have to be fast and powerful enough to actually handle all the data and edge cases as well.
> The real statement is that no one asked a few self-chosen individual who have never travelled beyond their own valley to ruin text handling in computers like the American Standard Code for Information Interchange has.
That much is objectively false. Language designers made a choice to use it; they could’ve used other systems.
Also LBJ mandated that all systems used by the federal government use ASCII starting in 1969. Arguably that tied language designers hands, since easily the largest customer for computers had chosen ASCII.
>no one asked a few self-chosen individual who have never travelled beyond their own valley to ruin text handling in computers like the American Standard Code for Information Interchange has.
Are you seriously mad that the people who invented computers chose to program in their native language, and built tooling that was designed around said language?
That's a rather uncharitable take on ASCII when you consider the context. Going all the way back to the roots of encodings, it was a question of how much you could squeeze into N bits of data, because bits were expensive. In countries where non-Latin alphabets were used, they used similar encoding schemes with those alphabets (and for those variants, Latin was not supported!).
Except for the, what, 80% of the world's population who use languages that can't be written with ASCII.