11.001 Explain what Unicode is, why it was developed, and how many characters can be represented.

Unicode was conceived of in about 1990 in order to: “providesa unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. The Unicode Standard has been adopted by such industry leaders as Apple, HP, IBM, JustSystem, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Sybase, Unisys and many others. Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc., and is the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646. It is supported in many operating systems, all modern browsers, and many other products. The emergence of the Unicode Standard, and the availability of tools supporting it”

Unicode uses a 2 byte character set meaning there are 2¹⁶ = 65,536 combinations.