We do not take it for granted. Instead, we design systems to be such because it makes many things much simpler. This is the reason why UTF-8 has basically "wo

We do not take it for granted. Instead, we design systems to be such because it makes many things much simpler. This is the reason why UTF-8 has basically "won" over UTF-16 or UCS-4 when it comes to encoding Unicode characters. If anything, with the amount of data we have today, unless there is a big reason (probably political, but even they exist today for eg. China not to want to use an Unicode transformation based on American Standard Code for Information Interchange) to re-encode all historical data, backwards compatibility will be maintained with the computers of the future (if they still exist). Yes, even if we move their bytes to be 13-qubit qubytes :D To elaborate on the cost: re-encoding all data from 2050 is probably not going to be too expensive in 2400, but by then you'll need to re-encode data from up to 2400. To me this seems like a reason that backwards compatibility will make sense to be kept because there is not much to be gained. Eg. UTF-8 approach has shown us the best way forward. The trickiest is going to be to keep all video/audio encoding algorithms, especially as they are patent encumbered.