From Wikipedia. > In 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. This increased

From Wikipedia. > In 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. This increased the Unicode codespace to over a million code points, So that seems like a fair analysis. I know we still did latin-1 DBs here into 2005, but I think you had to choose charsets at that point. Everyone knew you should do Unicode but there were so many excusese not to. Unicode still is harder than ascii because of that mindset.