If you're looking at the history, it's not when Unicode or UTF-8 was invented that mattered, it's when it emerged as a winner. Remember that networking people w

If you're looking at the history, it's not when Unicode or UTF-8 was invented that mattered, it's when it emerged as a winner. Remember that networking people wanted variable width characters for space reasons, and data processing people wanted fixed width characters for speed reasons. There were major battles in the international standards community before Apple and Xerox decided to do their own thing and called it Unicode.