I don't think so? Aren't UCS surrogate pairs at most 16bit each by their very purpose? Also, >16bit unicode code points came much later, I believe, in Unicode 2

I don't think so? Aren't UCS surrogate pairs at most 16bit each by their very purpose? Also, >16bit unicode code points came much later, I believe, in Unicode 2.0 in 1996 according to Wikipedia (vs UTF-8 which is from around 1992)