Why does MySQL use latin1_swedish_ci as the default?

Question

Does anyone know why latin1_swedish is the default for MySQL. It would seem to me that UTF-8 would be more compatible right?

Defaults are usually chosen because the

Answer 1

Most strange features of this kind are historic. They did it like that long time ago, and now they can't change it without breaking some app depending on that behavior.

Perhaps UTF8 wasn't popular then. Or perhaps MySQL didn't support charsets where multiple bytes encode on character then.