As Internet access spreads, costs decrease, and the online population extends to all corners of the globe, additional demands will be placed on developers, who have to consider language issues when they write programs, on system administrators, who have to maintain larger, global networks, and also on managers, who have to stay on top of increasingly far-flung business operations. This article, the first in a two-part series, provides a general introduction to character code pages, and presents two internationalization solutions that SAP currently offers: blended code pages and Multi-Display/Multi-Processing (MDMP) code pages. Code pages are only one aspect of internationalization, but they are the most critical because it is crucial that users be able to see, enter, and print all of the characters used in their language.