Marketing wizardry & handling of far-east languages.

[rja]

One need not have System V Release 4 to support several languages
on one system concurrently.  System V.3 has been supporting 
multi-lingual use for years now.  AT&T sells several Native Language
System (NLS) packages including support for both European and
Asian languages (I'm not aware of Arabic support yet).  Similarly,
HP has NLS for about the same set of languages (though Japanese
users would probably not want to use HP-UX since they used some non-standard
character sets in their Japanese implementation and interoperability
can be a problem { caveat: unless things have changed recently} ).

The XEROX Star system (which I believe to be the basis of ViewPoint)
is probably the most multilingual system on the market since it supports
virtually all languages and can mix text in arbitrary ways in a file.
(Aside:  Their Chinese entry system is remarkably easy to use.)

The Apple Macintosh can handle the ISO 8859 family of standards
and Apple also has software to support Japanese/Chinese on the
Macintosh.  (Available through APDA for less than US$100.)