[exporectomy]

Unicode really wasn't practical at all back then. Unless your entire system end-to-end was built internally, you'd have to interact with some non-unicode software. There was also no agreement on a common UTF-8 encoding, and other unicode encodings were all broken anyway.

Names have been spoken and hand-written since forever yet somehow computers aren't good at that so we all tolerate converting them to printed-looking text. Nobody cares, it doesn't matter.