A group of unique symbols used for display and printing. Character sets for languages that use the English alphabet generally contain 256 symbols, which is the number of combinations one byte can hold. Except for special fonts, such as Dingbats and Greek symbols, the symbols are the same for the first 128 characters. The letters may have different styling due to their typeface, but an "M," for example, is an "M" in the same sequential order in each character set.
The second 128 characters differ depending on the font/character set chosen. See
ASCII chart for the actual characters in the PC-8 character set, which was defined for the original IBM PC. See
extended ASCII,
code page and
Unicode.