National Replacement Character Set

The National Replacement Character Set, or NRCS for short, was a feature supported by later models of Digital's (DEC) computer terminal systems, starting with the VT200 series in 1983. NRCS allowed individual characters from one character set to be replaced by one from another set, allowing the construction of different character sets on the fly. It was used to customize the character set to different local languages, without having to change the terminal's ROM for different counties, or alternately, include many different sets in a larger ROM. Many 3rd party terminals and terminal emulators supporting VT200 codes also supported NRCS.

Description

ASCII is a 7-bit standard, allowing a total of 128 characters in the character set. Some of these are reserved as control characters, leaving 96 printable characters. This set of 96 includes upper and lower case letters, numbers, and basic math and punctuation.

ASCII does not have enough room to include other common characters such as multi-national currency symbols or the various accented letters common in European languages. This led to a number of country-specific varieties of 7-bit ASCII with certain characters replaced. For instance, the UK standard simply replaced ASCII's hash mark, #, with the pound symbol, £. This normally led to different models of a given computer terminal or printer, differing only in the glyphs stored in ROM. These were standardized as part of ISO/IEC 646.^[1][2]

On an 8-bit clean serial link, ASCII can be expanded to support a total of 256 characters. In this case, instead of replacing the characters in the original printable characters range from 32 to 127, new characters are added in the 128 to 255 range. This offers enough room for a single character set to include all the variety of characters used in North America and western Europe. This capability led to the introduction of the ISO/IEC 8859-1 standard character set containing 191 characters of what it calls the "Latin alphabet no. 1", but normally referred to as "ISO Latin". Windows-1252 is a slightly expanded superset of ISO Latin.^[1]

NRCS was introduced to solve the problem of requiring different terminals for each country by allowing characters in the basic 7-bit ASCII set to be re-defined by copying the glyph from the DEC's version of ISO Latin, the Multinational Character Set (MCS). This meant that the ROM had to store only two character sets, standard ASCII and MCS, and could build any required local ASCII variant on the fly. For instance, instead of having a separate "UK ASCII" version of the terminal with a modified glyph in ROM, the terminal included an NRCS with instructions to replace the hash mark glyph with the pound. When used in the UK, typing Shift 3 produced the pound, the same keys pressed on a US terminal produced hash.^[1]

The NRCS could be set through a setup command, or more commonly, by replacing the keyboard with a model that sent back a code when first booted. That way simply plugging in a UK keyboard, which had a pound sign on the 3 key, automatically set the NRSC to that same replacement.^[1]

NRC Sets

DEC terminals from the VT220 on had 12 different NRCS sets:^[1]

Note that most references for NRCS come from the era of printed manuals, and this leads to a number of problems when those manuals are converted to electronic format. The table above is taken from the digitized version of the DEC VT320 manual, and contained several "not known" symbols indicating improper translation. The table also has slight differences to various other references,^[3] which also have slight differences between each other.

References

Citations

Bibliography

• DEC (June 1987). VT320 Programming Summary, Appendix E. Digital Press. 
• Grou (June 2014). Digital Guide To Developing International Software. Digital Press.