Multinational Character Set
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.
| MIME / IANA | DEC-MCS |
|---|---|
| Alias(es) | IBM1100, CP1100, WE8DEC, csDECMCS, dec |
| Language(s) | English, various others |
| Extends | US-ASCII |
| Succeeded by | ISO 8859-1, LICS, BraSCII, Cork encoding |
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:
| MCS code point | Unicode mapping | Character |
|---|---|---|
| 0xA8 | U+00A4 | ¤ |
| 0xD7 | U+0152 | Π|
| 0xDD | U+0178 | Ÿ |
| 0xF7 | U+0153 | œ |
| 0xFD | U+00FF | ÿ |
Character 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 | Œ 0152 | Ø | Ù | Ú | Û | Ü | Ÿ 0178 | 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 | œ 0153 | ø | ù | ú | û | ü | ÿ 00FF |
See also
- Lotus International Character Set (LICS), a very similar character set
- BraSCII, a very similar character set
- 8-bit DEC Greek (Code page 1287)
- 8-bit DEC Turkish (Code page 1288)
- 8-bit DEC Hebrew
- 8-bit DEC Cyrillic (KOI-8 Cyrillic)
- 8-bit DEC Special Graphics (VT100 Line Drawing) (DEC-SPECIAL)
- 8-bit DEC Technical Character Set (DEC-TECHNICAL)
- DEC Kanji (JIS X 0208)
References
This article uses material from the Wikipedia English article Multinational Character Set, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license ("CC BY-SA 3.0"); additional terms may apply (view authors). Content is available under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
®Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wiki Foundation, Inc. Wiki English (DUHOCTRUNGQUOC.VN) is an independent company and has no affiliation with Wiki Foundation.