The Lotus Multi-Byte Character Set (LMBCS) is a proprietary multi-byte character encoding originally conceived in 1988 at Lotus Development Corporation with input from Bob Balaban and others. Created around the same time and addressing some of the same problems, LMBCS could be viewed as parallel development and possible alternative to Unicode. For maximum compatibility, later issues of LMBCS incorporate UTF-16 as a subset. Commercially, LMBCS was first introduced as the default character set of Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3 for DOS in March 1989 and Lotus 1-2-3/G Release 1 for OS/2 in 1990 replacing the 8-bit Lotus International Character Set (LICS) and ASCII used in earlier DOS-only versions of Lotus 1-2-3 and Symphony. LMBCS is also used in IBM/Lotus SmartSuite, Notes and Domino, as well as in a number of third-party products. LMBCS encodes the characters required for languages using the Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Cyrillic scripts, the Thai, Chinese, Japanese and Korean writing systems, and technical symbols. (en)
The Lotus Multi-Byte Character Set (LMBCS) is a proprietary multi-byte character encoding originally conceived in 1988 at Lotus Development Corporation with input from Bob Balaban and others. Created around the same time and addressing some of the same problems, LMBCS could be viewed as parallel development and possible alternative to Unicode. For maximum compatibility, later issues of LMBCS incorporate UTF-16 as a subset. (en)