Editing Multinational Character Set (section)

{{Short description|DEC character encoding used on VT220 terminals}}
{{Infobox character encoding
| name = Multinational Character Set (MCS)
| mime = DEC-MCS
| alias = IBM1100, CP1100, WE8DEC, csDECMCS, dec
| image = 
| caption = 
| standard = 
| lang = [[English language|English]], [[Western Latin character sets (computing)|various others]]
| status =
| extends = [[US-ASCII]]
| prev = 
| next = [[ISO 8859-1]], [[Lotus International Character Set|LICS]], [[BraSCII]], [[Cork encoding]]
| otherrelated = 
}}
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]] [[computer terminal|terminal]]. It was an 8-bit extension of [[ASCII]] that added accented characters, [[currency symbol]]s, and other character glyphs missing from 7-bit ASCII.  It is only one of the [[code page]]s implemented for the VT220 [[National Replacement Character Set]] (NRCS).<ref name="vt220_pr"/><ref name="TinyTERM"/> MCS is registered as IBM '''code page/[[CCSID]] 1100''' ('''Multinational Emulation''') since 1992.<ref name="CP1100"/><ref>{{cite web|title=CCSID 1100 information document|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141201234938/http://www-01.ibm.com/software/globalization/ccsid/ccsid1100.html|archive-date=2014-12-01|url=http://www-01.ibm.com/software/globalization/ccsid/ccsid1100.html}}</ref> Depending on associated sorting [[Oracle Database|Oracle]] calls it '''WE8DEC''', '''N8DEC''', '''DK8DEC''', '''S8DEC''', or '''SF8DEC'''.<ref name="Oracle_2002_DEC"/><ref name="Daylight_DEC"/>
 
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<ref name="ECMA_1985_ECMA94_R1"/> and [[ISO 8859-1]] in 1987.<ref name="Czyborra_1998"/>

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:

{|class=wikitable
! 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]]
|}