Multinational Character Set

The DEC Multinational Character Set ( DEC MCS short ) is a character set, which was designed by the Digital Equipment Corporation for use with the VT220 terminal (1983). It is an 8- bit extension of ASCII with additional letters with accents, currency symbols, and other characters that are missing in 7-bit ASCII.

Such extensions of ASCII, there were many special about DEC MCS is that it is a direct ancestor of ISO 8859-1 and Unicode. A comparison with ISO 8859-1 or the first 256 characters of Unicode reveals the many similarities, the few differences are highlighted in yellow in the table below.

Reference

  • Digital Equipment Corporation Multinational Character Set ( DEC MCS) at Columbia University, accessed on May 22, 2013
  • Encoding
Null character End of File Acknowledge character Bell character Backspace Row (database) Apostrophe Full stop 3 (number) 4 (number) 6 (number) 8 (number) 9 (number) Colon (punctuation) Question mark K Bracket Tilde
224915
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