A few years back, John McConnell gave a day 2 keynote at the 26th Internationalization an Unicode Conference, entitled The Windows Language Roadmap or When Do We Get Rongo-Rongo?.

The subtitle, in a bold tradition that was subsequently taken up by this very blog you are now reading, had little to do with the actual presentation, but provided an interesting title and a fun story that cannot be found in the slides (leaving people who did not attend the talk wondering what it was all about, just as with the moose at the end of the presentation!).

(He did give a slightly longer version of the talk at the 2004 Global Development and Deployment Conference, where the advantage of a video version of the presentation online exists for your enjoyment. :-)

Anyway, for your reading pleasure I will (with John's permission) provide the transcript of the story below, but it is right at the beginning of the video and definitely worth listening to in John's unique storytelling style if you have the time (since I did not include a laughtrack it's the only way you can find out where the crowd was amused!).

enjoy!

I've had several people ask me about the title of this talk "When do we get to Rongo-Rongo?". Some people thought I made up the name. I'll explain, it has a little bit of a personal history.

One of the very first projects I had when I was still a developer involved in globalization was back in the mid-80s. It was for a very large customer whose name I can't mention, but they're in Langley, Virginia.

The assignment I had was to support bidirectional text; technically the documents supported left-to-right, it did not support bidirectional. So I understood and worked with people who understood bidirectional text and I was able to work that out.

But being the ambitious little nerd that I was, I went off to a library and I decided I would find out more about writing systems. Because I knew vaguely that East Asian text was written vertically and I thought, 'well maybe I should generalize my code so I can support vertical writing.'

So the library was a wonderful resource. I found out about ancient Greek writing, which (I'll probably say this wrong) Boustrophedon, where they would write one line going one way and then the next line would start there and go back. And that was very appealing to me.

But then even better was Rongo-Rongo, which it sounds like it's made up by teenagers or something, but it was a language used on Easter Island, or I shouldn't say language, a writing system on Easter Island.

I believe there's only like 120, some small number of samples. They are on these large round disks. It has never been fully deciphered.

But the thing that was really wonderful about it is it's written sort of like Boustrophedon, but when you get to the second line, rather than just going backwards, it actually turns upside down.

So this really put me into a fever, writing the code.

So, unfortunately in that particular coding assignment I ultimately concluded that I couldn't support Rongo-Rongo -- the performace hit was just a little too great.

And so, when I delivered the software to the salespeople they said "What languages does it support?" and I said "It'll support anything except Rongo-Rongo."

I said this as sort of a joke, but about a month later we had the version two requirements, which said that "Version two must support Rongo-Rongo."

So ever since that experience it's been the goal at the end of the rainbow, it's where we will eventually get to before I retire....

The full presentation talks about ELKs and LIPs and lots off the other things I talk about here, and is worth a listen, in my opinion. :-)

So here is a quick and dirty Q&A:

Q: What company was John working for back in mid 80's?

A: He was working for DEC at the time, though the contract was for that customer in Langley, Virginia. 

Q: Does Unicode support Rongo-Rongo?

A: Rongo-Rongo is not yet encoded in Unicode.

Q: Does Vista support it?

A: The first step that Windows requires when it comes to language support is support within Unicode (after that we can get into fonts and shaping engines and such), so given the answer to the first question, the answer to this one would also be no.

Q: Will Microsoft ever support Rongo-Rongo?

A: It is worth noting that John has not retired yet, so who knows what the future holds? It is still at the end of the rainbow....

 

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