EBCDIC was obsolete in the 90s, and people in Europe have had names that EBCDIC couldn't spell since at least then (technically true! :D). The issue is that wh

EBCDIC was obsolete in the 90s, and people in Europe have had names that EBCDIC couldn't spell since at least then (technically true! :D). The issue is that whatever bottom of the barrel priced contractor they used gave them a "cheaper" new system in 1995 that was already obsolete. Now given the era, they could have made the choice to use wide chars instead and it would have been a reasonable choice (wrong in the long term, but still reasonable - unicode was only a few years old at the time), and wchars are easily (ymmv) extendable to utf-16 without having to re-encode everything which is the problem they have with EBCDIC.