Latin-1, also known as ISO 8859-1, is a character encoding standard that represents the first 256 characters of the Unicode character set. It includes the basic Latin alphabet, digits, punctuation marks, and special characters used in Western European languages. This encoding allows computers to display and manipulate text in languages such as English, French, and German. Developed in the early 1980s, Latin-1 was widely adopted for web pages and email before the rise of UTF-8, which supports a much larger range of characters. While Latin-1 is still used in some legacy systems, UTF-8 has become the preferred encoding for modern applications due to its versatility and compatibility with all Unicode characters.