The need for a common encoding for Tamil was felt by members of various mailing list based forums in the mid-1990s, as there were multiple custom coded fonts were prevalent in those forums. While some of the commercial encodings were popular than the others, they were not accepted by wider community due to conflicting commercial interests. While Unicode was accepted by most as the future standard, most of the desktop systems at that time were still not capable of handling Unicode for Tamil language, and an interim 8-bit encoding was required. A separate mailing list for discussion of such encodings (webmasters@Tamil.net) was created in 1997 to initiate this discussion, starting with an email written by
Dr.K.Kalyanasundaram to the popular Tamil author
Sujatha who headed the committee for standardization of Tamil keyboard. This forum quickly attracted enthusiastic participants from across the globe, including several prominent Tamil scholars. Archives of these discussion are maintained by
INFITT. Subsequent to publishing TSCII, most of the members of webmasters@Tamil.net mailing list became part of INFITT, which is a wider initiative to bring in standardization and continued development in various areas of Tamil computing. ==Codepage layout==