What's the Difference Between 7-Bit ASCII and Unicode?

There is no uniform structure once you go above 7-bit ASCII. The idea was that most of the characters would be nailed down, but there would be a few characters that you were allowed to swap in national letters. Once we kind of went to 8-bit bytes with the IBM 360,. And that standardizes it. Before that, there were lots of character sizes. They were all over the place. After the 360, it pretty much, we nailed down the 8-bit byte for a long, long time and forever. Eventually, we build out, we get Unicode. But who wants to go to 16-bit characters? Windows, apparently.