Opstad was a contributor to Unicode 1.0,[1][2][3] together with Joe Becker, Lee Collins, Huan-mei Liao, and Nelson Ng.
Opstad spent much of his career in private industry at Apple, where he contributed to its TrueType font specifications.
[4] Opstad has a Bachelor of Arts in Chinese and a Master of Library Science from University of California, Los Angeles.
[5][6] Among tech companies Opstad has worked for are Xerox, and Apple; he retired from the industry in 2021, leaving Monotype after more than 16 years.
[11][12] Besides his work on font standards, Opstad's work on the earliest versions of Unicode—proposing the use of discrete 16-bit character codes (which was later increased, but retained via backwards compatible surrogate pairs), rather than the way that was then common and which he'd grown frustrated with, Xerox's Character Code Standard (XCCS)—led to easy exchange of messages between different computer hardware and operating systems without either mojibake or "tofu" ⟨□; �⟩.