| Mime | DEC-MCS |
|---|---|
| Alias | IBM1100, CP1100, WE8DEC, csDECMCS, dec |
| Lang | English, various others |
| Extends | US-ASCII |
| Next | 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 | Π|
| 0xDD | U+0178 | Ÿ |
| 0xF7 | U+0153 | œ |
| 0xFD | U+00FF | ÿ |
Character set
See also
- Lotus International Character Set (LICS), a very similar character set
- BraSCII, a very similar character set
- 8-bit DEC Greek (Code page 1287)
- 8-bit DEC Turkish (Code page 1288)
- 8-bit DEC Hebrew
- 8-bit DEC Cyrillic (KOI-8 Cyrillic)
- 8-bit DEC Special Graphics (VT100 Line Drawing) (DEC-SPECIAL)
- 8-bit DEC Technical Character Set (DEC-TECHNICAL)
- DEC Kanji (JIS X 0208)
References
- ^ "VT220 Programmer Reference Manual". 2 ed. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). 1984.
- ^ "TinyTERM Emulator — National Replacement Character Set (NRCS)". Century Software. Archived 2016-12-01 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2016-12-01. [sic]
- ^ "SBCS code page information - CPGID: 01100 / Name: Multinational Emulation". IBM Software: Globalization: Coded character sets and related resources: Code pages by CPGID: Code page identifiers. 1. IBM. 1992-10-01. Archived 2016-12-03 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2016-12-02. [1] [2] [3]
- ^ "CCSID 1100 information document". Archived 2014-12-01 at the Wayback Machine.
- ^ "Appendix A: Locale Data". Oracle9i Database Globalization Support Guide. Release 2 (9.2) ed. Oracle Corporation. 2002. Oracle A96529-01. Archived 2017-02-14 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2017-02-14.
- ^ "Oracle characterset descriptions for 9.2". Daylight Chemical Information Systems. 2017. Archived 2016-06-17 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2017-02-14.
- ^ Standard ECMA-94: 8-bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Set. 1 ed. European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA). March 1985. Archived 2016-12-02 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2016-12-01.
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.
- ^ "ISO 8859-1 and MCS". ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup. 1998. Archived 2016-12-01 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2016-12-01. [4] [5]