[TUHS] Earliest Non-English UNIX?

[Edouard Klein via TUHS]

For reference the earlier thread was

https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2023-March/028243.html
"[TUHS] Bell Foreign-Language UNIX Efforts"

in which I posted a history of France's Bull efforts to internationalize
UNIX in French, and also in Russian (!) for siberian gas fields:

https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2023-March/028248.html

But that was quite a bit later (late 80s, early 90s) than what Matt is
asking here.

The whole thread is worth a read. Looking forward to reading this one as
well to see if more comes up.

Cheers,

Edouard.

segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> writes:

> I recently got a Japanese copy of the SVR3 Programmer's Reference Manual as a
> reference on learning technical translation between Japanese and English. It got
> me wondering on the subject of Japanese UNIX again, and I recall some prior
> discussion about codepages and eventual UTF-8 use for this and other regional
> porting efforts, but UNIX use in non-English settings certainly predates UTF-8.
> From what I know of the Japanese situation, at least AT&T, Sony, and Sun were
> prominent players in the Japanese UNIX market early on.
>
> This has me curious more generally, are there good records on how UNIX became
> cosmopolitan, what non-English (and especially non-Latin) languages it was first
> translated into, and how involved, if at all, Bell Labs and UCB (as opposed to
> post divestiture ATTIS/USL) were in early efforts to localize UNIX outside of
> the anglophone world.
>
> Possibly related, the typo(I) page from V3 makes a quip about disabling the
> "English" mode to instead target other languages such as Urdu. Urdu is written
> in an Arabic-derived script rather than Latin. Was this just a "hey this is
> possible" quip or was that to suggest there was experience already by V3 of
> playing with non-Latin scripts in UNIX?
>
> - Matt G.