Computer technology has traditionally been the sole domain of a "techie" elite,fluent in both complex programming languages and in English — the universallanguage of science and technology. Computers were never designed to handlewriting systems that couldn't be translated into ASCII (American standard codefor information interchange). There wasn't much room for anything other than the26 letters of the English alphabet in a coding system that originally couldn'teven recognize acute accents and umlauts — not to mention nonalphabetic systemslike Chinese.
But tradition has been turned upside down. Technology has been popularized. GUIs(graphical user interfaces) like Windows and Macintosh have hastened the process(and indeed it's no secret that it was Microsoft's marketing strategy to usetheir operating system to make computers easy to use for the average person).These days this ease of use has spread beyond the PC to the virtual, networkedspace of the Internet, so that now nonprogrammers can even insert Java appletsinto their webpages without understanding a single line of code.
2. Competition for a chunk of the "global market" by major industry players An extension of (local) popularization is the export of information technologyaround the world.
Popularization has now occurred on a global scale and Englishis no longer necessarily the lingua franca of the user. Perhaps there is no truelingua franca, but only the individual languages of the users. One thing iscertain — it is no longer necessary to understand English to use a computer,nor it is necessary to have a degree in computer science.
A pull from non-English-speaking computer users and a push from technologycompanies competing for global markets has made localization a fast growing areain software and hardware development. This development has not been as fast asit could have been. The first step was for ASCII to become Extended ASCII. Thismeant that computers could begin to start recognizing the accents and symbolsused in variants of the English alphabet — mostly used by European languages.But only one language could be displayed on a page at a time.