<p>My code:</p>

<pre><code>        string input1;

        input1 = Console.ReadLine();

        Console.WriteLine("byte output");

        byte[] bInput1 = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(input1);


        for (int x = 0; x &lt; bInput1.Length; x++)
            Console.WriteLine("{0} = {1}", x, bInput1[x]);
</code></pre>

<p>outputs: </p>

<p>104
0
101
0
108
0
108
0
111
0</p>

<p>for the input "hello"</p>

<p>Is there a reference to the character map where I can make sense of this?</p>

You should read "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)" at
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
You can find a list of all Unicode characters at
http://www.unicode.org
but don't expect to be able to read the files there without learning a lot about text encoding issues.