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by AceJohnny2 1350 days ago
Windows supported Unicode in 1993 (NT 3.1) and 1995 (Win95) via UCS-2, a fixed-width 16-bit encoding.

In 1996, it was realized 16-bit wasn't enough, and was expanded in Unicode 2.0, which also included UTF-16, a variable-width encoding, which required the BOM.

Windows 2000 supported UTF-16 on release.

Why didn't Windows 2000 support UTF-8, which was invented in 1992 and implemented in Plan9 in that same year? Who can say...