riginal 7-bit plain ASCII, because it can be read, written,
copied and printed by any text editor or word processor, and it
is the only format compatible with 99% of all hardware and
software.

First published in January 1991, Unicode "provides a unique
number for every character, no matter what the platform, no
matter what the program, no matter what the language" (excerpt
from the website). This double-byte platform-independent
encoding provides a basis for the processing, storage and
interchange of text data in any language, and any modern
software and information technology protocols. Unicode is
maintained by the Unicode Consortium, and is a component of the
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) specifications.

= Language dictionaries

Logos is an international translation company with headquarters
in Modena, Italy. In 1997, Logos had 200 in-house translators
in Modena and 2,500 free-lance translators worldwide, who
processed around 200 texts per day. The company made a bold
move, and decided to put on the web all the linguistic tools
used by its translators, for the internet community to freely
use them as well. The linguistic tools were the Logos
Dictionary, a multilingual dictionary with 7 billion words (in
fall 1998); the Logos Wordtheque, a multilingual library with
300 billion words extracted from translated novels, technical
manuals and other texts; the Logos Linguistic Resources, a
database of 500 glossaries; and the Logos Universal Conjugator,
a database for verbs in 17 languages.

When interviewed by Annie Kahn on December 7, 1997 for the
French daily Le Monde, Rodrigo Vergara, head of Logos,
explained: "We wanted all our translators to have access to the
same translation tools. So we made them available on the
internet, and while we were at it we decided to make the site
open to the public. This made us extremely popular, and also
gave us a lot of exposure. This move has in fact attracted many
customers, and also allowed us to widen our network of
translators, thanks to contacts made in the wake of the
initiative."

In the same article, Annie Kahn wrote: "The Logos site is much
more than a mere dictionary or a collection of links to other
online dictionaries. The cornerstone is the document search
program, which processes a corpus of literary texts available
free of charge on the web. If you search for the definition or
the translation of a word ('didactique', for example), you get
not only the an