Yeah it's pretty old. Textmode interfaces began with the teletypewriter in the nineteenth century and UNICODE began around that time too. The programming interf

Yeah it's pretty old. Textmode interfaces began with the teletypewriter in the nineteenth century and UNICODE began around that time too. The programming interface for these machines wasn't standardized until the 1960's with ASCII, which was extended a decade later by ANSI X3.64-1979, and then again in the 90's by UTF-8. That's the trifecta of textmode definitions which, only as of these last few years, became basically universally supported. CGA is kind of just a uint16_t[20][80] array for personal computers. See also: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/ea0b5d9/tool/build/lib/pty.c#L40 https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/ea0b5d9/tool/build... You're absolutely right that the inconsistencies with textmode used to be about as awful as the inconsistencies we see with GUIs today. I'm certain things will get better if we consider that GUIs are a relatively recent invention by comparison. So it'll probably take another fifty years for widget authors to forge out a consensus that's as good and widely supported as the one we have now for terminals.