In a country like India, hundreds of thousand computer users still use legacy operating systems such as Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me. When a software application or web application is developed for mass use, many developers prefer to avoid using Unicode support thinking their applications won’t run on these systems. However, this is only a misconception that needs to be cleared.

While there is little doubt to say Unicode applications run faster under later operating systems from the Microsoft stable such as Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 and now Windows Vista; it is not very difficult to develop and run Unicode based applications for Windows 98 and even 95. There could be two ways of doing it.

Microsoft has made available a ‘Microsoft Layer for Unicode on Windows 95/98/Me’, which can be used to develop applications with limited Unicode support to use on these operating systems. Microsoft Layer for Unicode makes your software appear to the legacy operating system as an application developed using old code-page technique.

Second way of doing so could be to make your application browser based. Internet Explorer 5+ versions have good Unicode support and the thin Unicode layer they provide could be exploited by programmers to port their Unicode applications to such systems. You may need to implement dynamic fonts for this. If you have not converted to Unicode thinking you would lose a large chunk of computer users, think again.

It is quite possible that your applications may run at a much slower speed on Windows 95/98/Me compared to Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista. The reason is obvious. The newer Microsoft operating systems are internally based on Unicode only. They use Unicode exclusively at the system level for character and string manipulation. All operating system calls (APIs) expect characters encoded in Unicode. Since the new OSes fulfill this criteria, they run Unicode based programs faster.