they said, since they were Americans and they were looking at English text which rarely used code points above U+00FF. Also they were liberal hippies in California who wanted to <em>conserve (sneer)</em>. If they were Texans they wouldn't have minded guzzling twice the number of bytes. But those Californian wimps couldn't bear the idea of <em>doubling</em> the amount of storage it took for strings, and anyway, there were already all these doggone documents out there using various ANSI and DBCS character set