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The Multinational Character Set 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 things missing from 7-bit ASCII.
Such "extended ASCII" sets were common, but MCS has the distinction of being the ancestor of both ISO 8859-1 and Unicode. If you compare the code chart of MCS with ISO 8859-1 or the first 256 code points of Unicode, you will see that they have many more similarities than differences (code points that differ from ISO 8859-1 are colored yellow):
| DEC Multinational Character Set | ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| x0 | x1 | x2 | x3 | x4 | x5 | x6 | x7 | x8 | x9 | xA | xB | xC | xD | xE | xF | |
| 0x | unused | |||||||||||||||
| 1x | ||||||||||||||||
| 2x | SP | ! | " | # | sign|$" target="_blank" >* | % | & | ' | ( | ) | * | + | , | - | . | / |
| 3x | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | : | ; | < | = | > | ? |
| 4x | @ | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O |
| 5x | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z | [ | \ | ] | *] | _ |
| 6x | ` | a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l | m | n | o |
| 7x | p | q | r | s | t | u | v | w | x | y | z | | | ~ | |||
| 8x | unused | |||||||||||||||
| 9x | ||||||||||||||||
| Ax | ¡ | ¢ | £ | ¥ | § | ¨ | © | ª | « | |||||||
| Bx | ° | ± | ² | ³ | µ | ¶ | · | ¹ | º | » | ¼ | ½ | ¿ | |||
| Cx | À | Á | Â | Ã | Ä | Å | Æ | Ç | È | É | Ê | Ë | Ì | Í | Î | Ï |
| Dx | Ñ | Ò | Ó | Ô | Õ | Ö | Œ | Ø | Ù | Ú | Û | Ü | Ý | ß | ||
| Ex | à | á | â | ã | ä | å | æ | ç | è | é | ê | ë | ì | í | î | ï |
| Fx | ñ | ò | ó | ô | õ | ö | œ | ø | ù | ú | û | ü | ÿ | |||
Reference
- ISO 8859-1 and MCS, from ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup; *
"Multinational Character Set"