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 |
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). [1] [2] MCS is registered as IBM code page/ CCSID 1100 (Multinational Emulation) since 1992. [3] [4] Depending on associated sorting Oracle calls it WE8DEC, N8DEC, DK8DEC, S8DEC, or SF8DEC. [5] [6]
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 [7] and ISO 8859-1 in 1987. [8]
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 | Œ |
0xDD | U+0178 | Ÿ |
0xF7 | U+0153 | œ |
0xFD | U+00FF | ÿ |
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 |
Since 1982 the urgency of the need for an 8-bit single-byte coded character set was recognized in ECMA as well as in ANSI/X3L2 and numerous working papers were exchanged between the two groups. In February 1984 ECMA TC1 submitted to ISO/TC97/SC2 a proposal for such a coded character set. At its meeting of April 1984 SC decided to submit to TC97 a proposal for a new item of work for this topic. Technical discussions during and after this meeting led TC1 to adopt the coding scheme proposed by X3L2. Part 1 of Draft International Standard DTS 8859 is based on this joint ANSI/ECMA proposal.... Adopted as an ECMA Standard by the General Assembly of Dec. 13–14, 1984.