IBM PC or MS-DOS code page 437, often abbreviated CP437 and also known as DOS-US or OEM-US, is the original character set of the IBM PC, circa 1981. The following is a table representing CP437 using the equivalent Unicode characters: IBM PC (IBM 5150) with keyboard and green screen monochrome monitor (IBM 5151), running MS-DOS 5. ... Microsofts disk operating system, MS-DOS, was Microsofts implementation of DOS, which was the first popular operating system for the IBM PC, and until recently, was widely used on the PC compatible platform. ... Code page is the traditional IBM term used for a specific character encoding table: a mapping in which a sequence of bits, usually a single octet representing integer values 0 through 255, is associated with a specific character. ... 1981 (MCMLXXXI) is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Unicode is an industry standard whose goal is to provide the means by which text of all forms and languages can be encoded for use by computers. ...

It is based on ASCII, with the following modifications: There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126. ...

• The C0 control range (0x00-0x1F hex) is mapped to graphics characters. The codes can assume their original function as controls (as they still do—typing "echo", space, control-G and then Enter causes the PC speaker to emit a beep—even on the command prompt on Windows XP), but in display, for example in a screen editor like MS-DOS edit, they show as graphics. The graphics are various, such as smiling faces, card suits and musical notes. Code 0x7F, DEL, similarly shows as a graphic (a house).

• The high-bit range, 0x80-0xFF, is mapped to various symbols: a few European characters (accented Latin vowels, etc) in no particular order and not sufficient for representation of most Western European languages, box-drawing characters, mathematical symbols and a few Greek letters.

The repertoire of CP437 was taken from the character set of Wang word-processing machines, as explicitly admitted by Bill Gates in the interview of him and Paul Allen in the 2^nd of October 1995 edition of Fortune Magazine: In mathematics and computer science, hexadecimal, or simply hex, is a numeral system with a radix or base of 16 usually written using the symbols 0–9 and A–F or a–f. ... Windows XP is a major revision of the Microsoft Windows operating system created for use on desktop computer systems. ... Some typical modern playing cards. ... Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-07-18, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ... Wang logo circa 1980. ...

"... we were also fascinated by dedicated word processors from Wang, because we believed that general-purpose machines could do that just as well. That's why, when it came time to design the keyboard for the IBM PC, we put the funny Wang character set into the machine—you know, smiley faces and boxes and triangles and stuff. We were thinking we'd like to do a clone of Wang word-processing software someday."

CP437 is inadequate for internationalisation, as it lacks characters necessary for some languages, such as À (capital A with grave) for French, and has only a few Greek letters. Later MS-DOS character sets, such as CP850 (DOS Latin-1), CP852 (DOS Central-European) and CP737 (DOS Greek), filled the gaps for international use while still being nearly compatible with CP437 by retaining the box-drawing characters. All CP437 characters are in Unicode and in Microsoft's WGL4 character set, therefore in most of the fonts on Microsoft Windows, and also in the VGA font of Linux, and the ISO 10646 fonts for X11. The code page 850 is a code page which was used in occidental Europe, under systems such as DOS. It has been largely replaced with ISO 8859-1 and UTF-8, but is still sometimes used. ... Code page 852 (CP 852, IBM 852, OEM 852) is a code page to be used under MS-DOS with Eastern European languages that use Latin script. ... Code page 737 (CP 737, IBM 737, OEM 737) is a code page to be used under MS-DOS to write Greek language. ... Unicode is an industry standard whose goal is to provide the means by which text of all forms and languages can be encoded for use by computers. ... Windows Glyph List 4, or more commonly WGL4 for short, is a character set defined by Microsoft and containing 652 characters. ... Microsoft Windows refers to a series of operating environments and operating systems created by Microsoft for use on personal computers and servers. ... Tux, a cartoon penguin frequently featured sitting, is the official Linux mascot. ... The international standard ISO/IEC 10646 defines the Universal Character Set (UCS) as a character encoding. ... KDE 3. ...

Implementors of mapping tables to Unicode should note that CP437 unifies some characters: 0xE1 is both the German sharp S (U+00DF, ß) and the Greek lowercase beta (U+03B2, β); 0xE4 is both the n-ary summation sign (U+2211, ∑) and the Greek uppercase sigma (U+03A3, Σ); 0xE6 is both the micro sign (U+00B5, µ) and the Greek lowercase mu (U+03BC, μ); 0xEA is both the Ohm sign (U+2126, Ω) and the Greek uppercase omega (U+03A9, Ω); and 0xEE is both the element-of sign (U+2208, ∈) and the Greek lowercase epsilon (U+03B5, ε). The ß — Eszett (IPA ) in German or scharfes S (sharp S) if spelled out — is a letter used only in the German alphabet. ... Beta (upper case Î’, lower case β) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. ... Sigma (upper case Σ, lower case σ, alternative ς) is the 18th letter of the Greek alphabet. ... Micro sign (µ, ) is the Unicode character U+00B5. ... Mu (upper case Îœ, lower case μ) is the 12th letter of the Greek alphabet. ... The ohm (symbol: Ω) is the SI unit of electric resistance. ... Omega (Ω ω) is the 24th and last letter of the Greek alphabet. ... In mathematics, an element (also called a member) is an object contained in a set (or more generally a class). ... Epsilon (upper case Ε, lower case ε) is the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet. ...

See also

• ASCII
• ASCII art
• ANSI art
• Western Latin character sets (computing)

There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126. ... ASCII art, an artistic medium relying primarily on computers for presentation, consists of pictures pieced together from characters (preferably from the 95 printable characters defined by ASCII). ... A screenshot of TheDraw editing an ANSI art picture of a shuttle; the purple text blinks ANSI art is a computer artform widely used at one time on BBSes. ... Several binary representations of the character sets used for Western European languages in computers are compared in this article. ...

External link

• Microsoft Code Page 437 reference chart