A brief history

In the early days of computers, there was 7-bit ASCII, but that wasn't good enough for the everyone, so someone came up with 16-bit Unicode. This was a good start, but it has its own problems. Finally, the guys who invented C got around to inventing UTF-8, which is backward-compatible with ASCII and dovetails into UTF-16 and UTF-32, so anyone around the world can write "Hello, World!" in their own language using their own characters on just about any computer. An added benefit of UTF-8 is that it is easily converted into/from Unicode when needed. Unicode didn't stop there; it evolved as well. Unicode and UTF-8 are different encodings, but they are still somewhat interrelated.