I used to have popular books about computers which had character maps of popular encoding in the appendices. Every book about programming, or using DOS/Windows

I used to have popular books about computers which had character maps of popular encoding in the appendices. Every book about programming, or using DOS/Windows 9x had them. Each book for system users (not even power users!) had a chapter about different character sets and common problems like this. This was important. I think the post office worker was enough of a geek or they took the package to the computer guy. Still more interesting thing to me was that the sender got the address in the wrong encoding and instead of asking via email, just must have thought that Russians have their little ways and dutifully copied all the gibberish (Russians even have a specific term for misencoded characters: krakozyabras).