As news outlets create headlines such as "A Cloud & A Prayer," "The Cloud Is the Computer," and "Leveraging Clouds to Make You More Efficient," many readers have been left with cloud confusion. Many definitions exist for cloud computing, and a uniform definition is hard to find. In its most basic form, cloud…

Discusses problems in using ASCII for data communications and computers and provides a historical perspective on the development of Unicode, a new universal encoding scheme. The future of Unicode is considered, implications for libraries are discussed, and a sidebar explains how computers store textual data. (LRW)