From:	Hart, Edwin F.
Sent:	Tuesday, July 29, 2003 09:58
To:	Worth, Helen E.
Cc:	Sager,  David G.; Nickerson, Craig M.; Cowgill, Tara L.
Subject:	RE: Staff Recognition Wall
Dear Helen,

In my previous response, I was confused about which award.  The 2002 award is a committee-level award from the Unicode Technical Committee and the INCITS [International Committee for Information Technology Standards] Technical Committee L2 for Codes, Character Sets and Internationalization on the occasion of my last meeting with them.  For many years, I had represented SHARE Inc., an association of IBM customers, to these standards committees.  I had been a member of L2 since 1990 and participated as vice-chairman and later chairman of that technical committee.  In 1996, I started participating in the Unicode Technical Committee.  My principal achievement occurred in 1991, when I lead the first discussions between Unicode and an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Working Group to merge the Unicode standard and the ISO/IEC 10646 standard into a single standard for representing (coding) all of the world's characters in computers.  Before that meeting, each group was working on its own standard, each with the same goal of encoding the world's characters, but the codes were not compatible.  SHARE viewed this situation as an impending disaster for the Information Technology industry.  With a lot of prayers, our 1991 discussions changed the direction for both organizations. They merged the two standards into one standard and married both committees so that both standards stayed synchronized as they evolved to code additional writing systems and features.  (With the goal of encoding the world's characters, the standards started with the most popular writing systems and are evolving by gradually adding additional writing systems.)  Today, ISO/IEC 10646 and the Unicode implementation of 10646 are THE standard multilingual code.  Both Internet (IETF) and World Wide Web (W3C) standards incorporate the 10646/Unicode standards.  Most vendors in the Information Technology arena have products that support 10646/Unicode.  For example, Microsoft supports it in the Office products (since Office 97), the Internet Explorer web browser, and in the Windows operating systems (Windows NT, 2000, XP, Server 2003).  The primary value of 10646/Unicode to the Laboratory is its upward compatibility with ASCII (the standard 7-bit character code in the US) and the rich set of mathematical and scientific characters.

The plaque reads as follows:

The Unicode Technical Committee & The INCITS Technical Committee L2 honor Edwin Hart for his many years of contributions to the standardization of character encodings.          November 5, 2002

Unfortunately, there is no picture.

If you have further questions, please let me know.

Best regards,
Ed

Edwin F. Hart
Applied Physics Laboratory
11100 Johns Hopkins Road
Laurel, MD  20723-6099
USA
+1-443-778-6926 (Baltimore Area)
+1-240-228-6926 (Washington DC Area)
+1-443-778-1093 (facsimile)
edwin.hart@jhuapl.edu

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Worth, Helen E.  
Sent:	Friday, July 25, 2003 10:48
To:	Hart, Edwin F.
Subject:	Staff Recognition Wall

Ed:
Congratulations on your recent Merit Award. I'd like to include you on the Lab's soon-to-be Staff Recognition Wall in Bldg. 1 and I have two questions. I understand your award if from the National Committee for Information Technology but could you give me a few words to explain what the award is recognizing. Is it for "software development advances" or "lifetime contributions in ...." ?

Also, do you have a photo showing you accepting the award? If so, I might want to use it on the wall or I will want to take a photo of you to use.

Thanks for your help.

-- Helen

Helen Worth
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Johns Hopkins Rd.
Laurel, MD 20723
(240) 228-5113