OEM character sets (Original Equipment Manufacturer). The 8th bit often contained characters for line drawings as a carry over from pre-GUI (Graphics User Interface) days. Different countries or companies did whatever they wanted with that 8th bit. Used by DOS, OS/2, floppy disks, and the FAT system (File Allocation System).

American DOS predominantly uses one of two character sets: 437 and 850.

437

Aka: IBM PC Extended Character Set; Extended ASCII; High ASCII; 437 U.S. English.

Used in IBM DOS and OS/2.

437 ECS character set

850

Aka: 850 Multilingual.

850 is Microsoft's "improvement" on 437. Some of the line drawing characters since the world was becoming GUI.

Used in MS DOS.

850 Multilingual character set

Page Modified: (Hand noted: 2007-07-28 02:01:39Z) (Auto noted: 2007-11-17 06:52:45Z)