Character Confusion

Swiss Binary Robot 
Computer technology accelerated quickly in the United States, and accordingly so did certain standards. Foremost was the decision to codify the basic unit of data in a byte (1). A byte was large enough to hold all characters in the English language as well as all digits, common punctuation, and still have room left over. In the end, the American National Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was devised to standardize how computers would store and communicate a, b, c, 1, 2, 3...
But anything as useful as a computer could not remain the province of one country or language, so software systems evolved to support people around the word. The big problem was... well... big characters.

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English has an amazingly compact alphabet - just 26 characters. Double that to allow for capital and lower case, and toss in digits 0 through 9, and you get a whopping 82 possible combinations before including punctuation. Since a byte can hold 256 different representations, ASCII and a one-byte-per-character system worked just fine for Americans, using 1/2 less than space available in a single byte.
But it didn't work for the Japanese, Chinese, and a number of cultures around the globe. Depending on the source, the idiomatic Chinese language can have upwards of 80,000 distinct characters. Using basic binary math, we see that instead of one byte for every character, Chinese computers would need to use upwards of three bytes. Add other languages and regional variations, and you had a mess. So different computer manufacturers, standards organizations, and government agencies went forward to solve this problem.