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.