Michael Everson
Michael was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania in 1963, and moved to Tucson, Arizona at the age of 12. He studied German, Spanish, and French for his B.A. at the University of Arizona (1985), and the History of Religions and Indo-European Linguistics for his M.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles (1988). He moved to Ireland in 1989, and was a Fulbright Scholar in the Faculty of Celtic Studies, University College Dublin (1991).
He is now based in Westport, Co. Mayo, Ireland, and is active in supporting minority-language communities, especially in the fields of character standardization and internationalization. He is one of the co-authors of the Unicode Standard, and is a Contributing Editor and Irish National Representative to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2, the committee responsible for the development and maintenance of the Universal Character Set. He is a linguist, typesetter, and font designer who has contributed to the encoding in of many scripts and characters. He received the Unicode "Bulldog" Award in 2000 for his technical contributions to the development and promotion of the Unicode Standard.
Active in the area of practical implementations, Michael has created locale and language information for many languages, from support for Irish and the other Celtic languages to the minority languages of Finland. In 2003 he was commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme to prepare a report on the computer locale requirements for Afghanistan, which was endorsed by the Ministry of Communications of the Afghan Transitional Islamic Administration. He prepared a number of fonts and keyboard layouts for Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther).
[Michael Everson, April 2005]
