Documents

A significant number of papers have been written on this subject:
 

Character sets. Letters, Tokens and Codes  Open in a new window...Johan W van Wingen
A Brief History of Characters Codes  Open in a new window...Steven J. Searle
History of Characters Codes  Open in a new window...Tom Jennings
A tutorial on character code issues  Open in a new window...Jukka "Yucca" Korpela
Survey of Code Page History  Open in a new window...Jiri Kuchta
Letter frequencies for 25 languages  Open in a new window... 
 
 
VT 100 - User Guide