In article , Paul Keinanen writes
Ask the people who made the decision in the ANSI committee back in
1987/8It has not been changed since then.
No bigotry at all. At the time the computer technology in the 80's was still fairly primitive. Remember at that time IBM were confident that mono or 16 colours at 320 by 200 was more than good enough for business ...... what do you mean people want computers at home? .
1 byte per char was all they had. The bottom half was standard and you could customise the top half.No idea but it is possible.