Even for Latin-script-based languages pre-unicode times were hard. Polish had about a dozen encodings: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodowanie_polskich_znak%C3%

Even for Latin-script-based languages pre-unicode times were hard. Polish had about a dozen encodings: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodowanie_polskich_znak%C3%B3w https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodowanie_polskich_znak%C3%B3w With the first 5 (except Mac) still in common use in 90s and the first 3 still used when unicode appeared. Most programmers in Poland in 90s remembered how encoding errors looked like between the most popular encoding pairs because it was a constant struggle.