I still remember the days when I couldn't use π and é in the same document, because there was no codepage that contained both of them. I also remember the days when pretty much any website that had non-English text had to have instructions on it for how to view it properly, because mojibake was so bloody common.

(It should also tell you something that not only is there a name for "computers failed at charsets", but the name is Japanese.)

No, it didn't. There were all kinds of encodings out there, and dealing with code pages was way worse than any inconveniences that Unicode has brought. Unicode was created for a reason, not just to torture US programmers with the diversity of scripts in the world.

Maybe it was nice if you worked for a US company without any operations abroad, which includes absolutely none of those which mattered.

Not for the majority of the world population who doesn't know English

That's not an answer. Be specific. How do you want to represent the 97k CJK characters?

> Computing did pretty well in the prior 50 years.

Contra:

* https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25812790/wrong-character...

I had to, in the year of our lord 2024, deal with a certain non-unicode system that ate one specific Cyrillic symbol when producing an open data artifact mandated by law. It was never fun then and it's still manages to create problems.

Only if you could expect a given person to only ever deal with one language. Anything international sucked and was a much bigger pain than now.

It would be impossible to e.g. build a site like Reddit where people can comment in any language.

Computing has improved massively over the last 50 years, not least because it now can accommodate peoples diverse languages.

Only if your name isn't 東久邇宮稔彦王.