>The distinction between bytes and characters is a fairly recent
development. When I bought my first computer in the 1990s it came with
Windows 3.11 and MS-DOS 6.22, and the german versions of those use
different "code pages"...
In the Computer Science Tripos at Cambridge University they always used
to ask a few open-ended questions, and I remember one from the early
1970s along the lines "Why is character encoding such a difficult thing
to get right?" Forty years on, getting it right hasn't become any easier.
However, I think any student answering that question would have been
expected to understand the difference between characters and the bytes
used to represent them.
Michael Kay
Saxonica
