Its not a joke. I worked for a big european bank network and the software there didn’t know how to translate from EBCDIC to UTF8 because none of the devs writing the software knew enough of the other side (mainframe vs PC) to realise this was an issue.

Their solution was “if the file has a ? in it when we receive it, it’s probably a £”. Which of course completely breaks down the day you have any other untranslated character.

I spent fucking weeks explaining this issue and why this was abominable, but apparently this wasn’t enough of an issue for people to fix it. Go figure…