BraSCII is an encoded repertoire of characters that was used in Brazil. It was used in the 1980s on several printers, in applications like , in video boards and it was the standard character set in the Brazilian line of MSX computers. This code page is known by Star printers as Code page 3847.

History

This character set was devised in 1986 by the Brazilian National Standards Organization (''Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas'' (ABNT)) through the standard NBR-9614:1986 and later revised in 1991 in the standard NBR-9611:1991. The code is based on the ISO/IEC 4873''Indústria Brasileira de Computadores — Perspectivas até os anos 90''
/ref> standards, and it was nicknamed "BraSCII" (Brazilian Standard Code for Information Interchange) in analogy to "

American Standard Code for Information Interchange ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...

" (ASCII). While ASCII is a 7-bit code, BraSCII is an 8-bit code, where the characters from 160 to 255 were configured to support extended characters. It is nearly identical to

ECMA-94 ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint ISO and IEC series of standards for 8-bit character encodings. The series of standards consists of numbered parts, such as ISO/IEC 8859-1, ISO/IEC 8859-2, etc. There are 15 parts, excluding the abandoned ISO/IEC 8859-12 ...

(1985) and

ISO 8859-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1 ...

(1987) except that the characters × and ÷ are replaced by Œ and œ, as they still were in the Multinational Character Set (MCS, 1983) and Lotus International Character Set (LICS, 1985), whereas these code points were empty in the earliest versions of

(1985) and ISO 8859-1. However, it is completely identical for the first draft of ECMA-94 and ISO 8859-1. In some other devices, this character set is simply referred as "ABNT". This character set was different from the other Brazilian character set, ABICOMP. The goal of this character set was to eliminate the "Babel's Tower" of the existing coding systems for the Portuguese language ( ISO IR-16, ISO IR-84, IBM 256 , IBM 275, IBM 850, DEC Multinational, HP Roman-8,

Mac OS Roman Mac OS Roman is a character encoding created by Apple Computer, Inc. for use by Macintosh computers. It is suitable for representing text in English and several other Western languages. Mac OS Roman encodes 256 characters, the first 128 of which ...

, etc.). In spite of that, this code set had troubles in imposing itself, mainly due to the pressure of big multinational corporations and finished by being less and less used because of the ubiquity of other character sets (ISO 8859-1 and later

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

Coverage

Each character is encoded as a single eight-bit code value. These code values can be used in almost any data interchange system to communicate in the following languages (with a few exceptions due to missing characters, as noted): *

Afrikaans Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans g ...

* Albanian *

Basque Basque may refer to: * Basques, an ethnic group of Spain and France * Basque language, their language Places * Basque Country (greater region), the homeland of the Basque people with parts in both Spain and France * Basque Country (autonomous c ...

* Breton * Corsican * Danish *

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national id ...

* Faroese * Galician *

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...

* Icelandic * Irish *

Indonesian Indonesian is anything of, from, or related to Indonesia, an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. It may refer to: * Indonesians, citizens of Indonesia ** Native Indonesians, diverse groups of local inhabitants of the archipelago ** Indonesia ...

* Italian * Leonese *

Luxembourgish Luxembourgish ( ; also ''Luxemburgish'', ''Luxembourgian'', ''Letzebu(e)rgesch''; Luxembourgish: ) is a West Germanic language that is spoken mainly in Luxembourg. About 400,000 people speak Luxembourgish worldwide. As a standard form of t ...

* Malay *

Manx Manx (; formerly sometimes spelled Manks) is an adjective (and derived noun) describing things or people related to the Isle of Man: * Manx people **Manx surnames * Isle of Man It may also refer to: Languages * Manx language, also known as Manx ...

* Norwegian *

Occitan Occitan may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the Occitania territory in parts of France, Italy, Monaco and Spain. * Something of, from, or related to the Occitania administrative region of France. * Occitan language Occitan (; ...

Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Port ...

Rhaeto-Romanic Rhaeto-Romance, Rheto-Romance, or Rhaetian, is a purported subfamily of the Romance languages that is spoken in south-eastern Switzerland and north-eastern Italy. The name "Rhaeto-Romance" refers to the former Roman province of Raetia. The questi ...

Scottish Gaelic Scottish Gaelic ( gd, Gàidhlig ), also known as Scots Gaelic and Gaelic, is a Goidelic language (in the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family) native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a Goidelic language, Scottish Gaelic, as well a ...

Scots Scots usually refers to something of, from, or related to Scotland, including: * Scots language, a language of the West Germanic language family native to Scotland * Scots people, a nation and ethnic group native to Scotland * Scoti, a Latin na ...

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: ** Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Ca ...

Swahili Swahili may refer to: * Swahili language, a Bantu language official in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda and widely spoken in the African Great Lakes * Swahili people, an ethnic group in East Africa * Swahili culture Swahili culture is the culture of ...

* Swedish *

Tagalog Tagalog may refer to: Language * Tagalog language, a language spoken in the Philippines ** Old Tagalog, an archaic form of the language ** Batangas Tagalog, a dialect of the language * Tagalog script, the writing system historically used for Tagal ...

* Walloon ;Notes The letter ''ÿ'', which appears in French only very rarely, and never at the beginning of words, is included only in lowercase form. The slot corresponding to its uppercase form is occupied by the lowercase letter '' ß'' from the German language, which itself is rarely used in its uppercase form.

Character set

References

{{character encoding Character sets 1986 establishments in Brazil Information technology in Brazil