02 What is Unicode?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode

The ASCII code with its 7 bits does not offer enough space to represent all characters of the human languages at the same time.

To meet the requirements of the different languages, Unicode was developed. It uses up to 32 bits per character and could thus distinguish over four billion different characters, but is limited to about one million permitted characters.

This means that all characters used by humans up to now can be represented, as long as they are included in the Unicode standard.

In October 1991, after several years of development, version 1.0.0 of the Unicode Standard was published, which at that time encoded only the European, Middle Eastern and Indian scripts. Eight months later, version 1.0.1 was released, encoding East Asian characters for the first time. With the release of Unicode 2.0 in July 1996, the standard was expanded from the original 65,536 to the current 1,114,112 code points, from U+0000 to U+10FFFF.