[dardeaup]

Yes, I'm quite sure that's true in most cases.

FWIW, dBASE IV version 1.5 does support Japanese for date format. It's one of the options for 'SET DATE' command.

[fluoridation]

Isn't that just the order of the date components for I/O? It's still just ASCII characters.

[dardeaup]

Yes! I was just pointing it out to show that they had at least thought of Japanese users (in some small way).

[Rizz]

But the past didn't use ASCII as such, but extended character sets, or multiple characters sets, which did allow for Russian, German, etc. text interfaces.

[FarmerPotato]

There is history frozen into printer manuals. One solution was control codes like DC1 to bank-switch the appearance of a block such as ASCII 128-159.