I get that it was a USAcentric thing, and that we should always be active w.r.t. calling out ethnocentric behavior. But it was also an "8-bit" thing and a "ext

I get that it was a USAcentric thing, and that we should always be active w.r.t. calling out ethnocentric behavior. But it was also an "8-bit" thing and a "extremely limited computing resources" thing. EBCDIC was designed in 1963/1964. I mean, when you've got 8 bits to represent a character, and there are more than 256 possible characters... what do you do? A truly robust solution like Unicode would not have been feasible with the resources of the day, and even a "simple" 16-bit scheme would barely be able to contain all 50,000 Chinese characters. The blame here lies with the Dutch bank who willingly chose an EBCDIC solution in 1995, although I'm sure they were dealing with various constraints and pressures as well.