The Multinational Character Set (DMCS or MCS) is a

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical v ...

created in 1983 by

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...

(DEC) for use in the popular VT220 terminal. It was an 8-bit extension of

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

that added accented characters, currency symbols, and other character glyphs missing from 7-bit ASCII. It is only one of the

code page In computing, a code page is a character encoding and as such it is a specific association of a set of printable character (computing), characters and control characters with unique numbers. Typically each number represents the binary value in a s ...

s 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 An oracle is a person or thing considered to provide insight, wise counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. If done through occultic means, it is a form of divination. Descript ...

calls it WE8DEC, N8DEC, DK8DEC, S8DEC, or SF8DEC. Such "

extended ASCII Extended ASCII is a repertoire of character encodings that include (most of) the original 96 ASCII character set, plus up to 128 additional characters. There is no formal definition of "extended ASCII", and even use of the term is sometimes critic ...

" 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 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 19 ...

in 1987. The code chart of MCS with ECMA-94, ISO 8859-1 and the first 256 code points of

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

have many more similarities than differences. In addition to unused code points, differences from ISO 8859-1 are:

Character set

References

{{Character encoding Character sets Digital Equipment Corporation Computer-related introductions in 1983

Character set

See also

References