I’m just reading Joel Spolksy’s excellent 2003 article on Unicode and character sets, I think for the first time. If you’re a programmer and have the least bit of doubt about character encodings, I’d go read it now, if I were you. Not least because it’s so damn well written.
The IBM-PC had something that came to be known as the OEM character set which provided some accented characters for European languages and a bunch of line drawing characters… horizontal bars, vertical bars, horizontal bars with little dingle-dangles dangling off the right side, etc., and you could use these line drawing characters to make spiffy boxes and lines on the screen, which you can still see running on the 8088 computer at your dry cleaners’.
