Unicode
Older standards for (English) text could represent only 32, 64, 128 (ASCII) or usually 256 different letters or symbols, 32 though only enough for upper case English letters and no numbers. ASCII is enough for English, but not most other languages, and 256 codes are enough for many European languages, but not for many Asian languages such as Chinese. Unicode has over 144,000 characters already defined, and allows for over a million, which is enough for all languages of the world, including e.g. Arabic and Hebrew that are written from right-to-left, and Unicode allows those languages, even mixed with other such as English or Russian that written in the other direction.