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| 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 |
| DEC Multinational Character Set[3][9][10][11][12][13][14] | ||||||||||||||||
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | A | B | C | D | E | F | |
| NUL | SOH | STX | ETX | EOT | ENQ | ACK | BEL | BS | HT | LF | VT | FF | CR | SO | SI | |
| DLE | DC1 | DC2 | DC3 | DC4 | NAK | SYN | ETB | CAN | EM | SUB | ESC | FS | GS | RS | US | |
| SP | ! | " | # | $ | % | & | ' | ( | ) | * | + | , | - | . | / | |
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | : | ; | < | = | > | ? | |
| @ | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | |
| P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z | [ | \ | ] | ^ | ||
| ` | a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l | m | n | o | |
| p | q | r | s | t | u | v | w | x | y | z | { | | | } | ~ | DEL | |
| IND | NEL | SSA | ESA | HTS | HTJ | VTS | PLD | PLU | RI | SS2 | SS3 | |||||
| DCS | PU1 | PU2 | STS | CCH | MW | SPA | EPA | CSI | ST | OSC | PM | APC | ||||
| ¡ | ¢ | £ | ¥ | § | ¤ 00A4 |
© | ª | « | ||||||||
| ° | ± | ² | ³ | µ | ¶ | · | ¹ | º | » | ¼ | ½ | ¿ | ||||
| À | Á | Â | Ã | Ä | Å | Æ | Ç | È | É | Ê | Ë | Ì | Í | Î | Ï | |
| Ñ | Ò | Ó | Ô | Õ | Ö | Œ 0152 |
Ø | Ù | Ú | Û | Ü | Ÿ 0178 |
ß | |||
| à | á | â | ã | ä | å | æ | ç | è | é | ê | ë | ì | í | î | ï | |
| ñ | ò | ó | ô | õ | ö | œ 0153 |
ø | ù | ú | û | ü | ÿ 00FF |
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