Multinational Character Set

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]

Multinational Character Set (MCS)

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

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

Character set

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

0_

NUL

SOH

STX

ETX

EOT

ENQ

ACK

BEL

BS

HT

LF

VT

FF

CR

SO

SI

1_

DLE

DC1

DC2

DC3

DC4

NAK

SYN

ETB

CAN

EM

SUB

ESC

FS

GS

RS

US

2_

SP

!

"

#

$

%

&

'

(

)

*

+

,

-

.

/

3_

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

:

;

<

=

>

?

4_

@

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

5_

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

[

\

]

^

_

6_

`

a

b

c

d

e

f

g

h

i

j

k

l

m

n

o

7_

p

q

r

s

t

u

v

w

x

y

z

{

|

}

~

DEL

8_

IND

NEL

SSA

ESA

HTS

HTJ

VTS

PLD

PLU

RI

SS2

SS3

9_

DCS

PU1

PU2

STS

CCH

MW

SPA

EPA

CSI

ST

OSC

PM

APC

A_

¡

¢

£

¥

§

¤ 00A4

©

ª

«

B_

°

±

²

³

µ

¶

·

¹

º

»

¼

½

¿

C_

À

Á

Â

Ã

Ä

Å

Æ

Ç

È

É

Ê

Ë

Ì

Í

Î

Ï

D_

Ñ

Ò

Ó

Ô

Õ

Ö

Π0152

Ø

Ù

Ú

Û

Ü

Ÿ 0178

ß

E_

à

á

â

ã

ä

å

æ

ç

è

é

ê

ë

ì

í

î

ï

F_

ñ

ò

ó

ô

õ

ö

œ 0153

ø

ù

ú

û

ü

ÿ 00FF

  Differences from ISO-8859-1

See also

• Lotus International Character Set (LICS), a very similar character set
• BraSCII, a very similar character set
• 8-bit DEC Greek (Code page 1287)
• 8-bit DEC Turkish (Code page 1288)
• 8-bit DEC Hebrew
• 8-bit DEC Cyrillic (KOI-8 Cyrillic)
• 8-bit DEC Special Graphics (VT100 Line Drawing) (DEC-SPECIAL)
• 8-bit DEC Technical Character Set (DEC-TECHNICAL)
• DEC Kanji (JIS X 0208)