Multinational Character Set

Encyclopedia : M : MU : MUL : Multinational Character Set

---

The Multinational Character Set is a character encoding created by Digital Equipment Corporation for use in the popular VT220 terminal. It was an 8-bit extension of ASCII that added accented characters, currency symbols, and other things missing from 7-bit ASCII.

Such "extended ASCII" sets were common, but MCS has the distinction of being the ancestor of both ISO 8859-1 and Unicode. If you compare the code chart of MCS with ISO 8859-1 or the first 256 code points of Unicode, you will see that they have many more similarities than differences (code points that differ from ISO 8859-1 are colored yellow):

DEC Multinational Character Set
	x0	x1	x2	x3	x4	x5	x6	x7	x8	x9	xA	xB	xC	xD	xE	xF
0x	unused
1x
2x	SP	!	"	#	$	%	&	'	(	)	*	+	,	-	.	/
3x	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	:	;	<	=	>	?
4x	@	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I	J	K	L	M	N	O
5x	P	Q	R	S	T	U	V	W	X	Y	Z	[		]	^	_
6x	`	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h	i	j	k	l	m	n	o
7x	p	q	r	s	t	u	v	w	x	y	z		~
8x	unused
9x
Ax		¡	¢	£		¥		§	¨	©	ª	«
Bx	°	±	²	³		µ	¶	·		¹	º	»	¼	½		¿
Cx	À	Á	Â	Ã	Ä	Å	Æ	Ç	È	É	Ê	Ë	Ì	Í	Î	Ï
Dx		Ñ	Ò	Ó	Ô	Õ	Ö	Œ	Ø	Ù	Ú	Û	Ü	Ý		ß
Ex	à	á	â	ã	ä	å	æ	ç	è	é	ê	ë	ì	í	î	ï
Fx		ñ	ò	ó	ô	õ	ö	œ	ø	ù	ú	û	ü	ÿ

Reference

• ISO 8859-1 and MCS, from ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup; [link]

 

---

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

?