Comment by clhodapp
13 years ago
Wikipedia tells me that Windows NT was started in 1988 and shipped in 1993, while Linux's first release was in 1991, giving them approximately the same age. Furthermore, NT shipped with UCS-2 support, not UTF-16, as UTF-16 did not exist until 1996. UTF-16 was a migration that they completed in Windows 2000. UTF-8 was first presented in 1993 and is, therefore, older than UTF-16.
With all of these facts being true (I hope), today things are such that the Windows world mostly (but not completely -- they sometimes assume two-byte characters) correctly implements UTF-16, while the Linux world correctly implements UTF-8.
Before 1996 (when 2.0 was released) Unicode was a 16bit fixed width encoding. And the first astral character allocations didn't happen until 3.1 was release in 2001.