Multinational Character Set
Encyclopedia
The Multinational Character Set (MCS) 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 character glyphs missing from 7-bit ASCII. It is only one of the code page
s implemented for the VT220
National Replacement Character Set.
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
.
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:
are colored yellow.
>
Character encoding
A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks or storage of text in...
created by Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
for use in the popular VT220
VT220
The VT220 was a terminal produced by Digital Equipment Corporation from 1983 to 1987.-Hardware:The VT220 improved on the earlier VT100 series of terminals with a redesigned keyboard, much smaller physical packaging, and a much faster microprocessor...
terminal
Computer terminal
A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system...
. It was an 8-bit extension of ASCII
ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
that added accented characters, currency symbols, and other character glyphs missing from 7-bit ASCII. It is only one of the code page
Code page
Code page is another term for character encoding. It consists of a table of values that describes the character set for a particular language. The term code page originated from IBM's EBCDIC-based mainframe systems, but many vendors use this term including Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle Corporation...
s implemented for the VT220
VT220
The VT220 was a terminal produced by Digital Equipment Corporation from 1983 to 1987.-Hardware:The VT220 improved on the earlier VT100 series of terminals with a redesigned keyboard, much smaller physical packaging, and a much faster microprocessor...
National Replacement Character Set.
Such "extended ASCII
Extended ASCII
The term extended ASCII describes eight-bit or larger character encodings that include the standard seven-bit ASCII characters as well as others...
" 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
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
.
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 |
Codepage layout
In the following table, code points that differ from ISO/IEC 8859-1ISO/IEC 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 1987. It is informally referred to as Latin-1. It is generally...
are colored yellow.