Template:Short description Template:Use dmy dates Template:Use list-defined references Template:Infobox character encoding
Code page 850 (CCSID 850) (also known as CP 850, IBM 00850,<ref name="IBM"/> OEM 850,<ref name="GGDC"/> DOS Latin 1<ref name="DIS"/>) is a code page used under DOS operating systemsTemplate:Efn in Western Europe.<ref name="IBM_CCSID850"/> Depending on the country setting and system configuration, code page 850 is the primary code page and default OEM code page in many countries, including various English-speaking locales (e.g. in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Canada), whilst other English-speaking locales (like the United States) default to the hardware code page 437.<ref name="Paul_1997_NWDOSTIP"/>
Code page 850 differs from code page 437 in that many of the box-drawing characters, Greek letters, and various symbols were replaced with additional Latin letters with diacritics, thus greatly improving support for Western European languages (all characters from ISO 8859-1 are included). At the same time, the changes frequently caused display glitches with programs that made use of the box-drawing characters to display a GUI-like surface in text mode.
After the DOS era, successor operating systems largely replaced code page 850 with Windows-1252,Template:Efn later UCS-2 and UTF-16,Template:Efn and finally UTF-8. However, legacy applications, especially command-line programs, may still depend on support for older code pages.
Character setEdit
Each non-ASCII character appears with its equivalent Unicode code-point. Differences from code page 437 are limited to the second half of the table, the first half being the same.
Code page 858Edit
Template:Infobox character encoding In 1998, code page 858 (CCSID 858)<ref name="IBM_CCSID858"/> (also known as CP 858, IBM 00858, OEM 858<ref name="GGDC"/>) was derived from this code page by changing code point 213 (D5hex) from a dotless i Template:Angbr to the euro sign Template:Angbr Template:Tt.<ref name="IBM_CPGID858_TXT"/><ref name="IBM2"/><ref name="IBMCP858INFO"/> Unlike most code pages modified to support the euro sign, the generic currency sign at CFhex was not chosen as the character to replace (compare ISO-8859-15 (from ISO-8859-1), code pages 808 (from 866), 848 (from 1125), 849 (from 1131) and 872 (from 855), ISO-IR-205 (from ISO-8859-4), ISO-IR-206 (from ISO-8859-13), and the changes to MacRoman and MacCyrillic).
IBM's PC DOS 2000, also released in 1998, just changed the definition of 850 to match 858 and called it modified code page 850.<ref name="Paul_2001_COUNTRY"/><ref name="Starikov_2005_CP866"/><ref name="Paul_2001_CPSwitch-64KB-Size"/><ref name="Paul_2001_CPI"/> This was done so programs that hard-coded 850 would be able to use the Euro sign. There may also have been a problem with Code Page Information (Template:Tt) files being limited to about six codepages maximum. More recent IBM/MS products implement codepage 858 under its own ID and have restored 850 to the original.<ref name="Paul_2001_CPSwitch-438-Entries"/>