I said they thought they were smart. I'm not going to judge whether it actually was smart based on the situation then. That said, UTF-8 was already 4 years old

I said they thought they were smart. I'm not going to judge whether it actually was smart based on the situation then. That said, UTF-8 was already 4 years old by the time Java came out. Surrogate pairs was added to Unicode in 1996, one year prior to the release of Java. I joined Sun Microsystems around that time, and Unicode really wasn't a thing in the Solaris world for a few more years, so the fact that people wasn't aggressively pushing good Unicode support at the time is understandable. People just didn't have much experience with it.