This character set was devised in 19862 by the Brazilian National Standards Organization (Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas (ABNT)) through the standard NBR-9614:1986 and later revised in 1991 in the standard NBR-9611:1991.3
The code is based on the ISO/IEC 48734 standards, and it was nicknamed "BraSCII" (Brazilian Standard Code for Information Interchange) in analogy to "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" (ASCII). While ASCII is a 7-bit code, BraSCII is an 8-bit code,5 where the characters from 160 to 255 were configured to support extended characters. It is nearly identical to ECMA-94 (1985) and ISO 8859-1 (1987) except that the characters × and ÷ are replaced by Œ and œ,678 as they still were in the Multinational Character Set (MCS, 1983) and Lotus International Character Set (LICS, 1985), whereas these code points were empty in the earliest versions of ECMA-94 (1985)9 and ISO 8859-1. However, it is completely identical for the first draft of ECMA-94 and ISO 8859-1. In some other devices, this character set is simply referred as "ABNT".
This character set10 was different from the other Brazilian character set, ABICOMP.
The goal of this character set was to eliminate the "Babel's Tower"11 of the existing coding systems for the Portuguese language (ISO IR-16, ISO IR-84, IBM 256, IBM 275, IBM 850, DEC Multinational, HP Roman-8, Mac OS Roman, etc.). In spite of that, this code set had troubles in imposing itself,1213 mainly due to the pressure of big multinational corporations and finished by being less and less used because of the ubiquity of other character sets (ISO 8859-1 and later Unicode).
See also: Latin-script alphabet
Each character is encoded as a single eight-bit code value. These code values can be used in almost any data interchange system to communicate in the following languages (with a few exceptions due to missing characters, as noted):
The letter ÿ, which appears in French only very rarely, and never at the beginning of words, is included only in lowercase form. The slot corresponding to its uppercase form is occupied by the lowercase letter ß from the German language, which itself is rarely used in its uppercase form.
"[Feature] MSX models are too european-centric for a japanese standard [sf#211] #235". github.com. https://github.com/openMSX/openMSX/issues/235 ↩
"A batalha dos protocolos de redes de computadores localizada (no Brasil) no fim do Século XX" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-12-15. Retrieved 2017-02-25. https://web.archive.org/web/20171215144225/http://www.cos.ufrj.br/shialc/content/docs/3.5_22SHIALCCarvalho_paper.pdf ↩
Ficha descritiva da norma NBR-9611 at ABNT site http://www.abntcatalogo.com.br/norma.aspx?ID=6270 ↩
Indústria Brasileira de Computadores — Perspectivas até os anos 90 http://www.mci.org.br/biblioteca/ind_bras_computadores.pdf ↩
"Epson Stylus Color 200 User Guide - PC865 Nordic, Abicomp, BRASCII". twinhead.manuals365.com. Archived from the original on 2016-10-13. Retrieved 2017-02-24. https://web.archive.org/web/20161013143705/http://twinhead.manuals365.com/swf/epson/sc200_u1.html?page=119 ↩
"Star LC 8021 User's Manual" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2020-09-29. Retrieved 2017-02-24. https://web.archive.org/web/20200929022733/https://www.star-m.jp/eng/service/usermanual/lc8021um.pdf ↩
"User manual for Brother HL-2135W - a user manual, servicing manual, settings and specifications ofBrother HL-2135W - page 136 - User manuals and advice for your devices - User-Manual.info". www.user-manual.info. http://www.user-manual.info/760683/printer/brother/hl-2135w/136/ ↩
Standard ECMA-94: 8-bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Set (PDF) (1 ed.). European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA). March 1985 [1984-12-14]. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2016-12-02. Retrieved 2016-12-01. http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST-WITHDRAWN/ECMA-94,%201st%20Edition,%20March%201985.pdf ↩
"Oki Data OKIPOS 425 D Developer's Guide 6.2.2.7 Abicomp". my.okidata.com. http://my.okidata.com/man-okipos425d.nsf/MOCContents/0070FDD018C775A685256AF800514082?OpenDocument ↩
Complete support except for Ǿ/ǿ which are missing. Ǿ/ǿ can be replaced with Ø/ø or øe at the cost of increased ambiguity. ↩
US and modern British. ↩
Basic classical orthography. ↩
Rumi script. /wiki/Rumi_script ↩
Bokmål and Nynorsk. ↩
European and Brazilian. ↩