The Century Solution: TCS

Previous versions of TERM for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows assumed a PC-centric world. All characters were treated as if they belong to the standard code page 437. This was often inaccurate for languages other than US English. This simple view of the data communications world is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Character flow through previous versions of the TERM and TinyTERM Emulators

To solve this problem, Century Software has created the TERM Character Set (TCS). TERM Character Set is a 16-bit character set, supporting up to 65,535 characters, which allows the TinyTERM Emulator to work with any modern language supported by the hardware and the operating system or window system. Inside the TinyTERM Emulator, all characters are handled in TCS rather than ASCII.

In order to communicate with the outside world in the 7- and 8-bit characters common to the computer industry, the TinyTERM Emulator now allows you to specify the code page in use for all external connections. These external connections include the remote system, the key-board, and the display. The input from and output to the remote system are specified separately, allowing the user to communicate with systems that map from one code page or character set to another.

As with all TERM configuration options, the code page settings are specified in a simple dialog box.