UTF-16, and non-BMP planes, were devised in 1996. The author seems to have been 5 years late to the party. UTF-16 was only made into a standard in 2000[0] The

UTF-16, and non-BMP planes, were devised in 1996. The author seems to have been 5 years late to the party. UTF-16 was only made into a standard in 2000[0] The first non-BMP characters weren't introduced until 2001[1] From a historical perspective, less than a month after Unicode 3.1 was released officially, it was not clear that Unicode (the standard, not the technical implementation of the encoding) would actually work. [0] - https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2781 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2781 [1] - http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr27/tr27-4.html http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr27/tr27-4.html