Code page

Code page is the traditional IBM term used for a specific variant of character coding for computers. Although the basis of many character sets is ASCII, ASCII was a seven bit code, with the 8-bit representation of ASCII either setting the top bit to zero or using it as a parity bit. Using this bit for data doubled the size of the possible character set, allowing another 128 characters to be added. No standard the existed for these "extended character sets", and IBM referred to the variants as code pages.

Although IBM maintained a myriad of code pages, the term has in general use taken on the meaning character coding for the IBM PC. Since the original IBM PC code page was not really designed for international use, several incompatible variants emerged:

• 437 -- Original PC extended character set
• 737 -- Greek characters
• 850 -- Multilingual, most European languages
• 858 -- Multilingual with euro symbol
• 860 -- Portugal
• 865 -- Nordic
• 868 -- Urdu
• 899 -- Symbol
• 904 -- Taiwan
• 1088 -- Revised Korean
• 1114 -- Taiwan
• 1252 -- Superset of ISO 8859-1, used by Microsoft Windows

The IBM PC code pages have now been rendered obsolete by international standards, specifically ISO 8859-1 and Unicode.

Other code pages of note are:

• 10000 -- Macintosh Roman (followed by several other Mac character sets)
• 12000 -- Unicode little-endian, 12001 big-endian
• 20000 -- CNS Taiwan, followed by other national character sets

External links

• IBM code pages (http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/software/globalization/codepages.html)