To add to this, there are some specific characteristics or acceptable practices within European alphabets (by the time that computers were invented) that helped

To add to this, there are some specific characteristics or acceptable practices within European alphabets (by the time that computers were invented) that helped. - The total number of characters needing representation is small. In the most limited case, you can get by with just the majuscule (upper case) characters. This means you can represent all letters in just a few bits. Representing all upper + lower + numbers + basic punctuation for almost any single language in Europe, even non-latinate languages is possible in just 7 or 8 bits! - The glyphs are linearized in a consistent direction. So data storage to display logic is very simple. This is opposed to languages like Korean where characters are assembled into syllables and text can flow left to right horizontally or right to left vertically. - Most European languages have both print and cursive forms. By the 20th century it was acceptable to use the disconnected print form, which made display logic much simpler (just copy the 8x8 bitmap in ROM to the screen). But importantly, special semi-ornamental characters, like ligatures, were acceptable to separate. - A more or less universal base-10 number system meant that we only needed to include 10 digits in the character set. Arithmetic only requires a handful of symbols. So you can include a pretty big subset of math in your character encoding. This is opposed to other systems that use distinct characters in ways similar to Roman numerals (e.g. Chinese numerals which also have financial and lay versions of counting). - Punctuation and simple arithmetic characters had been basically boiled down to about a dozen glyphs. - If you use 8-bits for your character encoding, you have so much space you can also include pretty much every character variant needed for all Latin using languages, allowing you to hit an addressable market of billions of people with the same 16k ROM.