[Newbies] Pre-Getting started info: Unicode, utf8, large memory need

[Charles Hixson]

Squeak looks interesting, but before getting started I need 3 pieces of 
info:
1)  How does one read&write utf8 files?
2)  Can strings by indexed by chars, even if they are unicode rather 
than ascii?
3)  What happens if you have more data than will fit into RAM?

(For 3 "use a database" is an acceptable answer, but I'm hoping for 
something involving automatic paging.)
(For 2 "use 4 bytes/char" is acceptable, but only if there's a good 
answer to 3.)

I thought I could just look this up in the documentation, but it doesn't 
seem to address these points...at least not until you start being able 
to read the code in the browser fluently.
These questions also don't seem to have been addressed in the mailing 
list before.  (At least a search didn't find them.)

An additional, but much less urgent, question is "How does one use 
Squeak on multiple cores of a multi-core processor?"