Multinational Character Set
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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. It is only one of the code pages implemented for the VT220 National Replacement Character Set.[1][2]
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 both ISO 8859-1 and Unicode.[3]
The code chart of MCS with 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 |
|---|---|---|
| A8 | U+00A4 | ¤ |
| D7 | U+0152 | Π|
| DD | U+0178 | Ÿ |
| F7 | U+0153 | œ |
| FD | U+00FF | ÿ |
[edit] Codepage layout
In the following table, code points that differ from ISO 8859-1 are colored yellow.
 |
The following character set table may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this table if you can. |
| 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 | Ÿ | 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 | |||
