In the beginning was the Enclave.
Inside the Enclave, all used the same character set, and all was good.
When you imported equipment to the Enclave, you modified it until it fitted to the charset used inside the Enclave, and all was good.
Then came the temptation of Communication, bringing with it the evils of the
Least Common Denominator and its brother, US-ASCII.
After having lived with this for a while, some folks discovered that many of their communication partners were in fact living in the same kind of enclave as they did.
Thus was born the National Variant of ASCII.
But all were not satisfied by this; all communication was not within
the Enclave, and not all were users of ASCII.
In short, we have a problem.