Multinational Character Set

Multinational Character Set (MCS)
MIME / IANADEC-MCS
Alias(es)IBM1100, CP1100, WE8DEC, csDECMCS, dec
Language(s)English, various others
ExtendsUS-ASCII
Succeeded byISO 8859-1, LICS, BraSCII, Cork encoding

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]

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
  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference vt220_pr was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference TinyTERM was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference CP1100 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ "CCSID 1100 information document". Archived from the original on 2014-12-01.
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference Oracle_2002_DEC was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference Daylight_DEC was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference ECMA_1985_ECMA94_R1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ Cite error: The named reference Czyborra_1998 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).