Initially there was a desire to use only 16 bits for all of Unicode. This would allow for only 65K characters - so space was at quite a premium. The jump from

Initially there was a desire to use only 16 bits for all of Unicode. This would allow for only 65K characters - so space was at quite a premium. The jump from 8 bits to 16 bits effectively doubled memory costs and still wasn't enough to achieve its goal.