East Asian computing immediately faced a much bigger problem than in Europe, as can be seen by the size of these common character sets. They resorted to double-byte coded character sets. Two-byte character sets provided 16 bits, and would allow for 216 (ie. 65,356) possible code points. In reality these character sets tended to be based on a 7-bit model, utilizing only a part of the total space available.

One particular problem persisted here – these character sets and their encodings were script specific. It was still difficult to represent Chinese, Korean and Japanese text simultaneously.