| Multinational Character Set (MCS) | |
| Mime: | DEC-MCS |
| Alias: | IBM1100, CP1100, WE8DEC, csDECMCS, dec |
| Lang: | English, various others |
| Extends: | US-ASCII |
| Next: | ISO 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). MCS is registered as IBM code page/CCSID 1100 (Multinational Emulation) since 1992.[1] Depending on associated sorting Oracle calls it WE8DEC, N8DEC, DK8DEC, S8DEC, or SF8DEC. 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 and ISO 8859-1 in 1987.
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 | Π| |
| 0xDD | U+0178 | Ÿ | |
| 0xF7 | U+0153 | œ | |
| 0xFD | U+00FF | ÿ |