More-or-less definitive information on all matters Unicode can be found at:
<http://www.unicode.org/>
The Unicode Consortium:
<http://www.unicode.org/unicode/consortium/consort.html>
Unicode Technical Report #17?Character Encoding Model:
<http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr17/>
A brief history of ASCII:
<http://www.bobbemer.com/ASCII.HTM>