I wonder if that placemat still exists today. It would be such an important piece of computer history.

I remember learning Japanese in the early 2000s and the fun of dealing with multiple encodings for the same language: JIS, Shift-JIS, and EUC. As late as 2011 I had to deal with processing a dataset encoded under EUC in Python 2 for a graduate-level machine learning course where I worked on a project for segmenting Japanese sentences (typically there are no spaces in Japanese sentences).

UTF-8 made processing Japanese text much easier! No more needing to manually change encoding options in my browser! No more mojibake!

I worked on a site in the late 90s which had news in several Asian languages, including both simplified and traditional Chinese. We had a partner in Hong Kong sending articles and being a stereotypical monolingual American I took them at their word that they were sending us simplified Chinese and had it loaded into our PHP app which dutifully served it with that encoding. It was clearly Chinese so I figured we had that feed working.

A couple of days later, I got an email from someone explaining that it was gibberish — apparently our content partner who claimed to be sending GB2312 simplified Chinese was in fact sending us Big5 traditional Chinese so while many of the byte values mapped to valid characters it was nonsensical.

I worked on an email client. Many many character set headaches.

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Read that a few times back then as well, but that and other pieces of the day never told you how to actually write a program that supported Unicode. Just facts about it.

So I went around fixing UnicodeErrors in Python at random, for years, despite knowing all that stuff. It wasn't until I read Batchelder's piece on the "Unicode Sandwich," about a decade later that I finally learned how to write a program to support it properly, rather than playing whack-a-mole.