BraSCII

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. However, it is completely identical for the first draft of ECMA-94 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).

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):