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Lee Collins is a software engineer and co-founder of the Unicode Consortium. In 1987, along with Joe Becker and Mark Davis they began to develop what is today known as Unicode.[1] Collins has a Master of Arts in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University[2][3] and was the Technical Vice President of Unicode Consortium from 1991 to 1993.[4]
In 1978, the initial proposal for a set of "Universal Signs" was made by Bob Belleville at Xerox PARC. Many persons contributed ideas to the development of a new encoding design. Beginning in 1980, these efforts evolved into the Xerox Character Code Standard (XCCS) by the present author, a multilingual encoding which has been maintained by Xerox as an internal corporate standard since 1982, through the efforts of Ed Smura, Ron Pellar, and others.Unicode arose as the result of eight years of working experience with XCCS. Its fundamental differences from XCCS were proposed by Peter Fenwick and Dave Opstad (pure 16-bit codes), and by Lee Collins (ideographic character unification). Unicode retains the many features of XCCS whose utility have been proved over the years in an international line of communication multilingual system products.