Multinational Character Set


The Multinational Character Set is a character encoding created in 1983 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 pages implemented for the VT220 National Replacement Character Set. MCS is registered as IBM code page/CCSID 1100 since 1992. Depending on associated sorting Oracle calls it WE8DEC, N8DEC, DK8DEC, S8DEC, or SF8DEC.
Such "extended ASCII" sets were common, but MCS has the distinction of being the ancestor of ECMA-94 in 1985 and ISO 8859-1 in 1987.
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 pointUnicode mappingCharacter
0xA8U+00A4¤
0xD7U+0152Œ
0xDDU+0178Ÿ
0xF7U+0153œ
0xFDU+00FFÿ

Character set