Newbie question about text encoding

[Steven D'Aprano]

Laura Creighton wrote:

> Dave Angel
> are you another Native English speaker living in a world where ASCII
> is enough?

ASCII was never enough. Not even for Americans, who couldn't write things
like "I bought a comic book for 10¢ yesterday", let alone interesting
things from maths and science.

I missed the whole 7-bit ASCII period, my first computer (Mac 128K) already
had an extended character set beyond ASCII. But even that never covered the
full range of characters I wanted to write, and then there was the horrible
mess that you got whenever you copied text files from a Mac to a DOS or
Windows PC or visa versa. Yes, even in 1984 we were transferring files and
running into encoding issues.



-- 
Steven