> A Western, American system might not be designed to accept names with accents and vowels because who has those in the States? Here in Brazil, names with acce

> A Western, American system might not be designed to accept names with accents and vowels because who has those in the States? Here in Brazil, names with accents on vowels are common. Yet some banking file formats still use positional (fixed-length fields) uppercase-only ASCII files. The format I'm thinking of also has a field in the header to specify whether the tape is formatted as 1600 BPI or 6250 BPI, so I'm inclined to think the cause is more technological than cultural.