Editing Code page 437 (section)

==Display adapters==
{{Unreferenced section|date=February 2025}}
The original IBM PC contained this font as a 9×14 pixels-per-character font stored in the [[Read-only memory|ROM]] of the [[IBM Monochrome Display Adapter|IBM Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA)]] and an 8×8 pixels-per-character font of the [[Color Graphics Adapter]] ([[Color Graphics Adapter|CGA]]) cards.{{citation needed|date=December 2019}} The [[Enhanced Graphics Adapter|IBM Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA)]] contained an 8×14 pixels-per-character version, and the [[Video Graphics Array|VGA]] contained a 9×16 version.{{citation needed|date=December 2019}}

All these display adapters have text modes in which each character cell contains an [[octet (computing)|8-bit]] character [[code point]] (see [[VGA-compatible text mode|details]]), giving 256 possible values for graphic characters. All 256 codes were assigned a graphical character in ROM, including the codes from 0 to 31 that were reserved in ASCII for non-graphical control characters.

Various Eastern European PCs used different character sets, sometimes user-selectable via jumpers or CMOS setup. These sets were designed to match 437 as much as possible, for instance sharing the code points for many of the line-drawing characters, while still allowing text in a local language to be displayed.