>>72
Looks like you have your 8 bit head too far up your ass... BTW, there have been machines with word sizes that weren't powers of 2, such as 36.
>>73
Memory wouldn't be too much expensive because you wouldn't be increasing its capacity, but modifying its column size, and it'd be pretty much the same later on. Buses would be more expensive at first, but who cares, look at what you're getting.
As for Unicode being the Chinese fault: fail. Fail hard. Epic proportions hard. In other words, American.
First, it's not only the Chinese but the Japanese, Korean, Thai, and a dozen more languages. Second, even if they didn't exist, 8 bytes would be the shit. Europe alone requires more than 256 characters, and different character sets are a fugly as shit hack invented by Americans so that they would be able to trade with all European countries (because the first 128 amerifags use are the same) but European countries wouldn't be able to talk to each other.