why isn't Unicode the default encoding?

[John Salerno]

Robert Kern wrote:

>   http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

That was fascinating. Thank you. So as it turns out, Unicode and UTF-8 
are not the same thing? Am I right to say that UTF-8 stores the first 
128 Unicode code points in a single byte, and then stores higher code 
points in however many bytes they may need? If so, I guess I had been 
mislead by the '8' in the name, thinking that UTF-8 was another way of 
storing characters in one byte (which would make it no different than 
Latin-1, I suppose).