Can't confirm that. In the 90s encodings were a nightmare. ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15, CP1252, IBM850, ...
If you tried to build a website with an upload form, you'd get the most bizarre encodings and there was no way to reliably distinguish them.
I'm not an English native, my world is full of umlauts and s-z ligatures. Things got A LOT better in the last years, thanks to Unicode encodings.