KOI87

KOI7 is a Cyrillic character encoding. It was developed in the Soviet Union and became widely used in Russia during the 1980s and early 1990s. The name KOI stands for "Kod Obmena Informatsiey," which translates to "Information Exchange Code." The number 7 refers to the number of bits used for each character.

KOI7 uses 7 bits per character, allowing for 128 possible characters. This was a common standard for early computing systems, which often had limited memory and processing power. The encoding includes uppercase and lowercase letters of the Russian alphabet, as well as some punctuation marks and control characters. However, it lacks characters found in other Cyrillic alphabets or specialized symbols.

As computing technology advanced and the need for broader character support grew, KOI7 began to be replaced by more comprehensive encodings such as KOI8-R and later by Unicode. KOI8-R, a direct successor, used 8 bits and offered a more complete set of Cyrillic characters. While KOI7 is largely obsolete today, understanding its historical context is important for comprehending the evolution of character encoding standards in the Russian-speaking world. Its limitations highlight the challenges faced in representing diverse languages digitally in the early days of personal computing.