BraSCII

BraSCII

Alias(es)	ABNT
Language(s)	Portuguese, English, various others
Extends	US-ASCII
Based on	DEC MCS
Other related encoding(s)	ISO-8859-1

BraSCII is an encoded repertoire of characters that was used in Brazil. It was used in the 1980s on several printers, in applications like Carta Certa, in video boards and it was the standard character set in the Brazilian line of MSX computers.^[1]

History

This character set was devised in 1986^[2] by the Brazilian National Standards Organization (Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas (ABNT)) through the standard NBR-9614:1986 and later revised in 1991 in the standard NBR-9611:1991.^[3]

The code is based on the ISO/IEC 4873^[4] standards, and it was nicknamed “BraSCII” (Brazilian Standard Code for Information Interchange) in analogy to “American Standard Code for Information Interchange” (ASCII). While ASCII is a 7-bit code, BraSCII is an 8-bit code,^[4] where the characters from 160 to 255 were configured to support extended characters. It is nearly identical to ECMA-94 (1985) and ISO 8859-1 (1987) except that the characters × and ÷ are replaced by Œ and œ,^[5][6][7] as they still were in the Multinational Character Set (MCS, 1983) and Lotus International Character Set (LICS, 1985), whereas these code points were empty in the earliest versions of ECMA-94 (1985)^[8] and ISO 8859-1. In some other devices, this character set is simply referred as “ABNT”.

This character set^[9] was different from the other Brazilian character set, ABICOMP.

The goal of this character set was to eliminate the “Babel’s Tower”^[4] of the existing coding systems for the Portuguese language (ISO IR-16, ISO IR-84, IBM 256 , IBM 275, IBM 850, DEC Multinational, HP Roman-8, Mac OS Roman, etc.). In spite of that, this code set had troubles in imposing itself,^[2][4] mainly due to the pressure of big multinational corporations and finished by being less and less used because of the ubiquity of other character sets (ISO 8859-1 and later Unicode).

Coverage

Each character is encoded as a single eight-bit code value. These code values can be used in almost any data interchange system to communicate in the following languages (with a few exceptions due to missing characters, as noted):

References