Also keep in mind that ISO’s official answer was UTF-1 not UTF-8, and UTF-8 wasn’t formally accepted as part of the Unicode and ISO standards until 1996. And early versions of UTF-8 still allowed the full 31 bit range of the original ISO 10646 repertoire, before it was limited to the 21 bit range of UTF-16. Also, a lot of early UTF-8 implementations were actually what we now call CESU-8, or had various other infelicities (such as accepting overlong encodings, nowadays commonly disabled as a security risk). So even in 1993, I’m not sure it was yet clear that UTF-8 was going to win.