San Jose, California
San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popul ...
, that specializes in
input method
An input method (or input method editor, commonly abbreviated IME) is an operating system component or program that enables users to generate characters not natively available on their input devices by using sequences of characters (or mouse o ...
s for various languages.
History
VN Labs was founded in 1984 by Viet Nguyen, an engineer at
Teledyne
Teledyne Technologies Incorporated is an American industrial conglomerate. It was founded in 1960, as Teledyne, Inc., by Henry Singleton and George Kozmetsky.
From August 1996 to November 1999, Teledyne existed as part of the conglomerate Al ...
, in
Newport Beach, California
Newport Beach is a coastal city in South Orange County, California. Newport Beach is known for swimming and sandy beaches. Newport Harbor once supported maritime industries however today, it is used mostly for recreation. Balboa Island, Newport ...
. The previous year, as a side project, he had created an PC-compatible
input method
An input method (or input method editor, commonly abbreviated IME) is an operating system component or program that enables users to generate characters not natively available on their input devices by using sequences of characters (or mouse o ...
for the
Vietnamese alphabet
The Vietnamese alphabet ( vi, chữ Quốc ngữ, lit=script of the National language) is the modern Latin writing script or writing system for Vietnamese language, Vietnamese. It uses the Latin script based on Romance languages originally develo ...
to improve the usability of his friend's astrology program. Nguyen began marketing his software to
Little Saigon
Little Saigon ( vi, Sài Gòn nhỏ or Tiểu Sài Gòn) is a name given to ethnic enclaves of expatriate Vietnamese mainly in English-speaking countries. Alternate names include Little Vietnam and Little Hanoi (mainly in historically communist ...
's many Vietnamese-language newspapers and magazines. In 1986, '' Người Việt Daily News'' adopted the input method, now named Diplomat, so that staffers would not have to mark up entire issues with diacritical marks by hand. By 1987, Nguyen left Teledyne to focus on VN Labs full-time.
Unlike its competitor
VNI
VNI Software Company is a developer of various education, entertainment, office, and utility computer software, software packages. They are known for developing an Character encoding, encoding (VNI encoding) and a popular input method (VNI Input) ...
, which also developed an input method, VN Labs went beyond Vietnamese and the Little Saigon community. By 1989, the Diplomat Software Series supported 23 languages, including
Albanian
Albanian may refer to:
*Pertaining to Albania in Southeast Europe; in particular:
**Albanians, an ethnic group native to the Balkans
**Albanian language
**Albanian culture
**Demographics of Albania, includes other ethnic groups within the country ...
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...
, the
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of char ...
,
New York University
New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin.
In 1832, the ...
,
Olympic Airways
Olympic Airlines ( el, Ολυμπιακές Αερογραμμές, ''Olympiakés Aerogrammés'' – OA), formerly named Olympic Airways for at least four decades, was the flag carrier airline of Greece. The airline's head office was located ...
,
Polaroid
Polaroid may refer to:
* Polaroid Corporation, an American company known for its instant film and cameras
* Polaroid camera, a brand of instant camera formerly produced by Polaroid Corporation
* Polaroid film, instant film, and photographs
* Polar ...
, the
United Nations
The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and international security, security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be ...
, the
United States Navy
The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most powerful navy in the world, with the estimated tonnage ...
, and the
United States Department of State
The United States Department of State (DOS), or State Department, is an executive department of the U.S. federal government responsible for the country's foreign policy and relations. Equivalent to the ministry of foreign affairs of other n ...
. VN Labs introduced support for
Windows 3.0
Windows 3.0 is the third major release of Microsoft Windows, launched in 1990. It features a new graphical user interface (GUI) where applications are represented as clickable icons, as opposed to the list of file names seen in its predecesso ...
in 1990 and subsequently added support for the
Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...
and the
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
encoding standard.
Products
The Diplomat Software Series is a collection of 23 software packages. Each package supports a single language. The
MS-DOS
MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...
input method
An input method (or input method editor, commonly abbreviated IME) is an operating system component or program that enables users to generate characters not natively available on their input devices by using sequences of characters (or mouse o ...
and
printer driver
In computers, a printer driver or a print processor is a piece of software on a computer that converts the data to be printed to a format that a printer can understand. The purpose of printer drivers is to allow applications to do printing without ...
. Versions for
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
and
Macintosh operating systems
Two major famlies of Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc.
In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the "Classic" Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system, rebranded " ...
include an input method and various
Unicode font
A Unicode font is a computer font that maps glyphs to code points defined in the Unicode Standard. The vast majority of modern computer fonts use Unicode mappings, even those fonts which only include glyphs for a single writing system, or even onl ...