🚀 go-pugleaf

ISO Latin-1, or more completely ISO Latin Alphabet No 1, is now an
international standard as of February 1987 (IS 8859, Part 1).
For those American USEnet'rs that care, the 8-bit ASCII standard,
which is essentially the same code, is going through the final 
administrative processes prior to publication.

The code table that was posted earlier by Mr. Sommarskog to the net is from
an earlier draft of the standard, the following changes have been made: 

OLD DRAFT: 
 
13/07   (This position shall not be used)
15/07   (This position shall not be used)

FINAL STANDARD:

13/07    MULTIPLICATION SIGN
15/07    DIVISION SIGN

Those two characters were added mainly out of the fear that individual vendors
would use the positions for non-interchangeable and incompatible purposes,
thus defeating the idea of the standard.  The two symbols chosen were more
or less a compromise from a large list of eligible characters.

ISO Latin-1 (IS 8859/1) is actually one of an entire family of eight-bit
one-byte character sets, all having ASCII on the left hand side, and with
varying repertoires on the right hand side:
     
Pt 1.   Latin Alphabet No 1  (caters to Western Europe - now approved)
Pt 2.   Latin Alphabet No 2  (caters to Eastern Europe - now approved)    
Pt 3.   Latin Alphabet No 3  (caters to SE Europe + others - in draft ballot)
Pt 4.   Latin Alphabet No 4  (caters to Northern Europe - in draft ballot)
Pt 5.   Latin-Cyrillic alphabet  (right half all Cyrillic - processing
                                   currently suspended pending USSR input)
Pt 6.   Latin-Arabic alphabet    (right half all Arabic - now approved)
Pt 7.   Latin-Greek alphabet     (right half Greek + symbols - in draft ballot)
Pt 8.   Latin-Hebrew alphabet    (right half Hebrew + symbols - proposed)
                                                               
I expect to update this list shortly, because next week I'm attending the
meeting of the ISO Working Group concerned with these standards is being held.
(ISO TC97/SC2/WG3 for those that can decipher that.) 
                                  
Regarding DEC Multinational:  The development of DEC Multinational 
preceded the original ISO drafts, which largely explains the differences.
It was actually ECMA, the European Computer Manufacturers Association, who
first proposed a eight-bit, one-byte code table similar to what became 
ISO Latin-1 today.

===================================
Tim Lasko  Digital Equipment Corporation  Maynard, MA
(video!lasko@dec.COM <-- boy I hope that's right...)