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Multinational Character Set
DEC character encoding used on VT220 terminals

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). MCS is registered as IBM code page/CCSID 1100 (Multinational Emulation) since 1992. Depending on associated sorting Oracle calls it WE8DEC, N8DEC, DK8DEC, S8DEC, or SF8DEC.

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 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
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Character set

DEC Multinational Character Set9101112131415
0123456789ABCDEF
0_NULSOHSTXETXEOTENQACKBEL BS  HT  LF  VT  FF  CR  SO  SI  
1_DLEDC1DC2DC3DC4NAKSYNETBCAN EM SUBESC FS  GS  RS  US 
2_ SP !"#$%&'()*+,-./
3_0123456789:;<=>?
4_@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO
5_PQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_
6_`abcdefghijklmno
7_pqrstuvwxyz{|}~DEL
8_INDNELSSAESAHTSHTJVTSPLDPLU RI  SS2SS3
9_DCSPU1PU2STSCCHMWSPAEPACSI ST OSC PM APC
A_¡¢£¥§¤00A4©ª«
B_°±²³µ·¹º»¼½¿
C_ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏ
D_ÑÒÓÔÕÖŒ0152ØÙÚÛÜŸ0178ß
E_àáâãäåæçèéêëìíîï
F_ñòóôõöœ0153øùúûüÿ00FF
  Differences from ISO-8859-1

See also

References

  1. "VT220 Programmer Reference Manual" (2 ed.). Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). 1984 [1983]. http://vt100.net/docs/vt220-rm/ ↩

  2. "TinyTERM Emulator — National Replacement Character Set (NRCS)". Century Software. Archived from the original on 2016-12-01. Retrieved 2016-12-01. [sic] http://www.centurysoftware.com/support/help/ttus_help/ttusNational_Replacement_Character_S.htm ↩

  3. "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 from the original on 2016-12-03. Retrieved 2016-12-02. [1] [2] [3] https://www-01.ibm.com/software/globalization/cp/cp01100.html ↩

  4. "CCSID 1100 information document". Archived from the original on 2014-12-01. https://web.archive.org/web/20141201234938/http://www-01.ibm.com/software/globalization/ccsid/ccsid1100.html ↩

  5. Baird, Cathy; Chiba, Dan; Chu, Winson; Fan, Jessica; Ho, Claire; Law, Simon; Lee, Geoff; Linsley, Peter; Matsuda, Keni; Oscroft, Tamzin; Takeda, Shige; Tanaka, Linus; Tozawa, Makoto; Trute, Barry; Tsujimoto, Mayumi; Wu, Ying; Yau, Michael; Yu, Tim; Wang, Chao; Wong, Simon; Zhang, Weiran; Zheng, Lei; Zhu, Yan; Moore, Valarie (2002) [1996]. "Appendix A: Locale Data". Oracle9i Database Globalization Support Guide (PDF) (Release 2 (9.2) ed.). Oracle Corporation. Oracle A96529-01. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2017-02-14. Retrieved 2017-02-14. https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B10501_01/server.920/a96529.pdf ↩

  6. "Oracle characterset descriptions for 9.2". Daylight Chemical Information Systems. 2017. Archived from the original on 2016-06-17. Retrieved 2017-02-14. http://www.daylight.com/meetings/emug04/Delany/charsets.html ↩

  7. 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. 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. http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST-WITHDRAWN/ECMA-94,%201st%20Edition,%20March%201985.pdf ↩

  8. Czyborra, Roman (1998). "ISO 8859-1 and MCS". ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup. Archived from the original on 2016-12-01. Retrieved 2016-12-01. [4] [5] http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html#ISO-8859-1 ↩

  9. "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 from the original on 2016-12-03. Retrieved 2016-12-02. [1] [2] [3] https://www-01.ibm.com/software/globalization/cp/cp01100.html ↩

  10. "VT220 Programmer Reference Manual". Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Table 2-3: DEC Multinational Character Set (C1 and GR Codes). Retrieved 2016-12-02. http://vt100.net/docs/vt220-rm/table2-3b.html ↩

  11. VAX/VMS User's Manual. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). April 1986. AI-Y517A-TE. /wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation ↩

  12. DEC (February 1992) [November 1989]. "Chapter 2: Character Encoding - DEC Supplemental Graphic Character Set". VT420 Programmer Reference Manual (PDF) (2 ed.). Digital Equipment Corporation. pp. 24–25. EK–VT420–RM.002. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2017-01-29. Retrieved 2017-01-29. http://manx-docs.org/collections/mds-199909/cd3/term/vt420rm2.pdf ↩

  13. Flohr, Guido (2016) [2006]. "Locale::RecodeData::DEC_MCS - Conversion routines for DEC_MCS". CPAN libintl-perl. 1.0. Archived from the original on 2017-01-14. Retrieved 2017-01-14. https://search.cpan.org/~guido/libintl-perl/lib/Locale/RecodeData/DEC_MCS.pm ↩

  14. Kostis, Kosta. "DEC Multinational Character Set (DEC MCS)". 1.20. Archived from the original on 2017-01-16. Retrieved 2017-01-16. http://www.kostis.net/charsets/decmcs.htm ↩

  15. Cowan, John Woldemar (1999-07-07). "DEC Multinational Character Set (1987) to Unicode". 0.1. Unicode, Inc. Archived from the original on 2017-02-18. Retrieved 2017-02-18. /wiki/John_Woldemar_Cowan ↩