A single user system, perhaps. I've worked on a system that … well, didn't predate Unicode, but was sort of near the leading edge of it and was multi-system.

A single user system, perhaps. I've worked on a system that … well, didn't predate Unicode, but was sort of near the leading edge of it and was multi-system. The database columns containing text were all byte arrays. And because the client (a Windows tool, but honestly Linux isn't any better off here) just took a LPCSTR or whatever, it they bytes were just in whatever locale the client was. But that was recorded nowhere, and of course, all the rows were in different locales. I think that would be far more common, today, if Unicode had never come along.