Lotus International Character Set
character set used by the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet 2.x for DOS
The Lotus International Character Set (LICS) is a proprietary single-byte character encoding introduced in 1985 by Lotus Development Corporation. It is based on the 1983 DEC Multinational Character Set (MCS) for VT220 terminals. As such, LICS is also similar to two other descendants of MCS, the ECMA-94 character set of 1985 and the ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) character set of 1987.
LICS was first introduced as the character set of Lotus 1-2-3 Release 2 for DOS in 1985. It is also utilized by 2.01, 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4 as well as by Symphony. It was also utilized in a number of third-party spreadsheet products emulating the file format. LICS was superseded by the Lotus Multi-Byte Character Set (LMBCS) introduced by Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3 in 1989.
Character set
Codepoints 20hex (32) to 7Fhex (127) are identical to ASCII (as well as to LMBCS). For some characters the table also lists dedicated Lotus 1-2-3 compose key sequences to ease character input beyond the Alt Numpad input method.
See also
Lotus Multi-Byte Character Set (LMBCS)
DEC Multinational Character Set (MCS)
BraSCII
References
Further reading
Born, Günter [in German] (December 2000) [1990].
The public source identifies “Lotus International Character Set” as character set used by the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet 2.x for DOS. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Lotus, International and Character.
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