Quick story

All started in 1960 with ASCII — American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII is a 7 bits encoding able to encode 128 characters among which 95 are printable.

Source: Wikipedia FR — ASCII

With the soaring of computers and the need to encode more and more languages it has been extended by a variety of so called Extended ASCII. There are not one but multiple Extended ASCII. The idea behind this change was to use the bit that was not used by ASCII to encode 128 additional characters while keeping the first 128 characters unchanged.

So far so good, users in America and Europe were able to encode all their characters simply by using the right charset. But in reality it raised some issues when exchanging messages across different regions.

For instance, if you wanted to share a document written using Latin-9 and featuring the euro symbol — € — to someone using Latin-1, she or he would have received another character instead — ¤.