The Multinational Character Set (MCS) is a character encoding created by Digital Equipment Corporation 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.
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 both ISO 8859-1 and Unicode.
The code chart of MCS with 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 |
|---|---|---|
| A8 | U+00A4 | ¤ |
| D7 | U+0152 | Π|
| DD | U+0178 | Ÿ |
| F7 | U+0153 | œ |
| FD | U+00FF | ÿ |
Read more about Multinational Character Set: Codepage Layout
Famous quotes containing the words character and/or set:
“Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!”
—Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936)
“I can add colors to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)