Well "saved in unicode" can mean many different things... utf8 is just one of many encodings in "unicode". There are others. One of the nice things about unicode is that all characters which can be encoded in the old 8-bit reprentation of 7-bit ascii are encoded exactly the same in utf8 (I think that's where the term "utf8" originates from... but I could be wrong).

Anyways, looking at Textpad, which is the editor I use when on windows: it has several encoding options, among them "ANSI" (which is the closest it has to ASCII), "UTF-8", and "Unicode". Here is how they encode the character string "adsf":

[me@host]$ hd ~/asdf.unicode
0000000   a nul   s nul   d nul   f nul        61 00 73 00 64 00 66 00
0000010
[me@host]$ hd ~/asdf.utf8
0000000   a   s   d   f        61 73 64 66
0000004
[me@host]$ hd ~/asdf.ascii
0000000   a   s   d   f        61 73 64 66
0000004
[me@host]$
[download]

Get the idea?