1968

• ASCII coded character set finalized

1987

• Latin-1 standard published

1991

• Release UCS-2, 16-bit storage (2 bytes, fixed width)

1992

• MFC Version 1.0 release
  • CString uses UCS-2
  • According to a blog by Raymond Chen Microsoft most likely moved to UTF-16 with the release of Windows XP

1993

• Release UCS-4, 32-bit storage (4 bytes, fixed width)

1995

• Java Version 1.0 string class uses UCS-2

1996

• Release UTF-8 (1-4 bytes, variable width)
• Release UTF-16 (2 or 4 bytes, variable width)

1998

• C++ STL added std::string, no encoding capabilities

1999

• Latin-9 standard published
• TrollTech releases Qt 2.0
  • QString is the native string class, uses UTF-16
  • Uses implicit sharing, copy on write (not allowable in C++11 STL)
  • Characters above 64k are stored using two 16-bit QChars

2001

• Release UTF-32

2002

• C# Version 1.0 string class uses UTF-16

2005

• Java Version 5.0 string class uses UTF-16

2017

• Release CsString, a Unicode aware string library