The original IBM PC used the 7-bit ASCII alphabet as its basis, but extended it to 8 bits with nonstandard character codes.
This character set was not suitable for some international applications, and soon a veritable cottage industry developed providing variants of the original character set in various national variants.
In IBM tradition, these variants were termed code pages.
These codings are now largely obsolete, having been replaced by more systematic and standardized forms of character coding, such as ISO 8859-1, Windows-1251 and Unicode.
The original character set is known as code page 437.
The original IBM PC used the 7-bit ASCII alphabet as its basis, but extended it to 8 bits with nonstandard character codes. This character set was not suitable for some international applications, and soon a veritable cottage industry developed providing variants of the original character set in various national variants. In IBM tradition, these variants were termed code pages. These codings are now largely obsolete, having been replaced by more systematic and standardized forms of character coding, such as ISO 8859-1, Windows-1251 and Unicode. The original character set is known as code page 437.
IBM Personal Computer