On: IRC History by Jarkko Oikarinen

[pavlov]

I was using MS-DOS back then. It had a command for changing the "code page", which would determine the appearance of special characters. (I imagine it was technically switching between preset character sets on the video card's character generator.)

So when you wanted to do word processing, you would first switch to the code page that has the Nordic characters. For programming, you'd switch to the US code page.

I don't know how real operating systems handled it :)

[dragonwriter → pavlov]

> I was using MS-DOS back then. It had a command for changing the "code page", which would determine the appearance of special characters. (I imagine it was technically switching between preset character sets on the video card's character generator.)

It still exists in Windows, for the same purpose.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc733037.aspx