I have yet to work on a project where neither charsets nor line-endings ever pop-up and cause problems... seeing as it is 2011, this is an absolutely abysmal testimony for IT as a whole.
Unicode was originally a 16-bit character set. The only myth is claiming otherwise. There was a 31-bit charset at the same time called ISO 10646. This was not Unicode.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_10646#History_of_ISO_10646" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_10646#History_of_ISO_10...</a>