so that the developing encodings would be mutually compatible. The early 2-byte encoding was called "UCS-2".

When it became increasingly clear that 2¹⁶ characters would not suffice, IEEE introduced a larger 31-bit space and an encoding (UCS-4) that would require 4 bytes per character. This was resisted by the Unicode Consortium, both because 4 bytes per character wasted a lot of memory and disk space, and because some manufacturers