Actually, it took a long time to get to Unicode. Computers started with 7-but character encodings (and many rivals, including EBCDIC). Thankfully, text process

Actually, it took a long time to get to Unicode. Computers started with 7-but character encodings (and many rivals, including EBCDIC). Thankfully, text processing became pretty critical so they formed ASCII, when they went from 7-bit encodings to 8-bit encodings things improved, but then committees realised Latin dialects together had more than 255 characters… hence for some time we were all in code page hell. That’s why you got ISO-8599 - the most famous of which is ISO-8599-1. The genius of Unicode was they took all this junk and mapper into character planes, with ISO-8599-1 plastered into the BMP. I went into it in detail years ago: http://randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com/2009/05/unicode-and-oracle.html?m=1 http://randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com/2009/05/unicode-and...