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Multinational Character Set

The Multinational Character Set is a character encoding created by Digital Equipment Corporation for use in the popular VT220 terminal. It was an 8-bit extension of ASCII that added accented characters, currency symbols, and other things missing from 7-bit ASCII.

Such "extended ASCII" sets were common, but MCS has the distinction of being the ancestor of both ISO 8859-1 and Unicode. If you compare the code chart of MCS with ISO 8859-1 or the first 256 code points of Unicode, you will see that they have many more similarities than differences (code points that differ from ISO 8859-1 are colored yellow):

DEC Multinational Character Set
	x0	x1	x2	x3	x4	x5	x6	x7	x8	x9	xA	xB	xC	xD	xE	xF
0x	unused
1x
2x	SP	!	"	#	$	%	&	'	(	)	*	+	,	-	.	/
3x	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	:	;	<	=	>	?
4x	@	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I	J	K	L	M	N	O
5x	P	Q	R	S	T	U	V	W	X	Y	Z	[	\	]	^	_
6x	`	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h	i	j	k	l	m	n	o
7x	p	q	r	s	t	u	v	w	x	y	z	{	|	}	~
8x	unused
9x
Ax		¡	¢	£		¥		§	¨	©	ª	«
Bx	°	±	²	|³		µ	¶	¹	º	»	¼	½		¿
Cx	À	Á	Â	Ã	Ä	Å	Æ	Ç	È	É	Ê	Ë	Ì	Í	Î	Ï
Dx		Ñ	Ò	Ó	Ô	Õ	Ö	Œ	Ø	Ù	Ú	Û	Ü	Ý		ß
Ex	à	á	â	ã	ä	å	æ	ç	è	é	ê	ë	ì	í	î	ï
Fx		ñ	ò	ó	ô	õ	ö	œ	ø	ù	ú	û	ü	ÿ

Reference

• ISO 8859-1 and MCS, from ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup;