In July 1992, the X/Open committee XoJIG was looking for a better encoding. Dave Prosser of Unix System Laboratories
submitted a proposal for one that had faster implementation
characteristics and introduced the improvement that 7-bit ASCII
characters would only represent themselves; all multibyte
sequences would include only bytes where the high bit was set. This
original proposal, FSS-UTF (File System Safe UCS Transformation Format),
was similar in concept to UTF-8, but lacked the crucial property of self-synchronization.