KOI8 remains much more commonly used than ISO 8859-5 , which never really caught on. Another common Cyrillic character encoding is Windows-1251 . In recent times, both might eventually give way to Unicode .
In Russian, KOI8 stands for ''Kod Obmena Informatsiey, 8 bit'' (Код Обмена Информацией, 8 бит) which means "Code for Information Exchange, 8 bit".
The KOI8 character sets have the property that the Russian Cyrillic letters are in pseudo-Roman order rather than the natural Cyrillic alphabetical order as in ISO 8859-5. Although this may seem unnatural, it has the useful property that if the 8th bit is stripped, the text can still be read (or at least deciphered) in case-reversed transliteration on an ordinary ASCII terminal. For instance, "Русский Текст" in KOI8-R becomes ''rUSSKIJ tEKST'' ("Russian Text") if the 8th bit is stripped.
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