Code Page 850

Code page 850 (also known as CP 850, IBM 00850, OEM 850, MS-DOS Latin 1) is a code page used under MS-DOS in Western Europe. It is the code page commonly used by the version of MS-DOS underlying Windows ME. It is also sometimes used on English DOS systems, although code page 437 is generally the default on those.

It was largely replaced with, firstly, Windows-1252 (often mislabeled as ISO-8859-1), and later with UCS-2, and finally with UTF-16 (the NT line was natively Unicode from the start, but issues of development tool support and compatibility with Windows 9x kept most applications on the 8-bit code pages).

Code page 850 differs from code page 437 in that many of the box drawing characters, Greek letters, and various symbols were replaced with additional Latin letters with diacritics, thus greatly improving support for Western European languages (all characters from ISO 8859-1 are included). At the same time, the changes frequently caused display glitches in programs that made use of the box drawing characters to display a GUI-like surface in text mode, such as Turbo Pascal.

In 1998, code page 858 was derived from this code page by changing code point 213 (D5_hex) from dotless i ‹ı› to the euro sign ‹€›.