The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff: jpluimers

Apart from the mandatory Joel on Software article about Unicode and Character sets, these two articles are of great value too:

• Encodings Before ASCII From a Mechanical Perspective.
• Character Encodings For Modern Programmers.

Fun to read from that blog is the Historical Technology  section including this article:

• Baudot Code Telegraph – US Patent 388244.

–jeroen

PS: The mandatory one is The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) – Joel on Software.