ALL computers can have military uses.
We spend a large part of our time manipulating character codes between the various hosts we use. We await the Unicode standard with some interest. I suppose it was barely adequate in the days of punch cards, but today it is unacceptable. In several European countries it is legally mandated that products must deal with the host language correctly. So far as I know it's not used in any language, and appears to be a corruption of the Dutch ij digraph.