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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.

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

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

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.

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.

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