Editing Code page 850 (section)

{{Short description|Computer character set for Latin scripts}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=December 2019|cs1-dates=y}}
{{Use list-defined references|date=January 2022}}
{{Infobox character encoding
| name = Code page 850
| mime = IBM850
| alias = cp850, 850, csPC850Multilingual,<ref name="IANA_2018"/> DOS Latin 1, OEM 850
| image = Codepage-850.png
| caption = Code page 850 character&nbsp;set with 9×14 glyphs, as usually rendered by [[Video Graphics Array]] (VGA)
| standard = 
| lang = [[English language|English]], [[Western Latin character sets (computing)|various others]]
| status = 
| encodes = [[ISO/IEC 8859-1]] (reordered)
| extends = [[US-ASCII]]
| prev = 
| next = 
| basedon = [[OEM-US]]
| classification = [[Extended ASCII]], [[OEM code page]]
| otherrelated = [[Code page 858]] (PC DOS 2000's "modified code page 850"), [[code page 437]]
}}

'''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 systems{{efn|as well as [[Psion (company)|Psion]]'s [[EPOC (operating system)#EPOC16|EPOC16]] operating system}} 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]] [[code page 437|437]].<ref name="Paul_1997_NWDOSTIP"/>

Code page 850 differs from [[code page 437]] in that many of the [[box-drawing character]]s, [[Greek alphabet|Greek letters]], and various symbols were replaced with additional Latin letters with [[diacritic]]s, 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 system]]s largely replaced code page 850 with [[Windows-1252]],{{efn|akin to and not always well-distinguished from [[ISO-8859-1]]}} later [[UCS-2]] and [[UTF-16]],{{efn|The [[Windows NT]] line was natively [[Unicode]] from the start, but issues of development tool support and compatibility with [[Windows 9x]] kept most applications on the 8-bit code pages.}} and finally [[UTF-8]]. However, legacy applications, especially [[command-line program]]s, may still depend on support for older code pages.