Multinational Character Set
DEC character encoding used on VT220 terminals
The Multinational Character Set (DMCS or MCS) is a character encoding created in 1983 by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for use in the popular VT220 terminal. It was an 8-bit extension of ASCII that added accented characters, currency symbols, and other character glyphs missing from 7-bit ASCII. It is only one of the code pages implemented for the VT220 National Replacement Character Set (NRCS). MCS is registered as IBM code page/CCSID 1100 (Multinational Emulation) since 1992. Depending on associated sorting Oracle calls it WE8DEC, N8DEC, DK8DEC, S8DEC, or SF8DEC.
Such "extended ASCII" sets were common (the National Replacement Character Set provided sets for more than a dozen European languages), but MCS has the distinction of being the ancestor of ECMA-94 in 1985 and ISO 8859-1 in 1987.
The code chart of MCS with ECMA-94, ISO 8859-1 and the first 256 code points of Unicode have many more similarities than differences. In addition to unused code points, differences from ISO 8859-1 are:
01Character set
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | A | B | C | D | E | F | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0_ | NUL | SOH | STX | ETX | EOT | ENQ | ACK | BEL | BS | HT | LF | VT | FF | CR | SO | SI |
| 1_ | DLE | DC1 | DC2 | DC3 | DC4 | NAK | SYN | ETB | CAN | EM | SUB | ESC | FS | GS | RS | US |
| 2_ | SP | ! | " | # | $ | % | & | ' | ( | ) | * | + | , | - | . | / |
| 3_ | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | : | ; | < | = | > | ? |
| 4_ | @ | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O |
| 5_ | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z | [ | \ | ] | ^ | _ |
| 6_ | ` | a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l | m | n | o |
| 7_ | p | q | r | s | t | u | v | w | x | y | z | { | | | } | ~ | DEL |
| 8_ | IND | NEL | SSA | ESA | HTS | HTJ | VTS | PLD | PLU | RI | SS2 | SS3 | ||||
| 9_ | DCS | PU1 | PU2 | STS | CCH | MW | SPA | EPA | CSI | ST | OSC | PM | APC | |||
| A_ | ¡ | ¢ | £ | ¥ | § | ¤00A4 | © | ª | « | |||||||
| B_ | ° | ± | ² | ³ | µ | ¶ | · | ¹ | º | » | ¼ | ½ | ¿ | |||
| C_ | À | Á | Â | Ã | Ä | Å | Æ | Ç | È | É | Ê | Ë | Ì | Í | Î | Ï |
| D_ | Ñ | Ò | Ó | Ô | Õ | Ö | Œ0152 | Ø | Ù | Ú | Û | Ü | Ÿ0178 | ß | ||
| E_ | à | á | â | ã | ä | å | æ | ç | è | é | ê | ë | ì | í | î | ï |
| F_ | ñ | ò | ó | ô | õ | ö | œ0153 | ø | ù | ú | û | ü | ÿ00FF |
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Multinational Character Set”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
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