How to Unify Behind a Standard Character Encoding

There are different character encodings for different languages, at least that was the case back in the 80s and the 90s. And you might remember that when you installed Mac OS or Windows or a Unix based operating system there would often be language packs on top of it. So this was a real problem and we had to find a way to solve it by unifying behind a standard character encoding. What character encoding do we use today?