YUSCII was an informal name for JUS I.B1.002, national variant of ISO 646, 7-bitLatiniccharacter encoding standard, and used in Yugoslavia before widespread use of later ISO-8859-2, Microsoft and Unicode standards. It was named after ASCII, having the first word "American" replaced with "Yugoslav": "Yugoslav Standard Code for Information Interchange". It maintained the same codes for all essential characters and replaced a number of symbols with letters specific to languages spoken in Yugoslavia.
YUSCII was originally developed for teletypetelegraphs but it also spread for computer use. This was widely considered a bad idea among software developers who needed the original ASCII such as {, [, }, ], ^, ~, |, \ in their source code. Numerous attempts to replace it with something better kept failing due to limited support. Eventually, Microsoft's introduction of code pages, appearance of Unicode and availability of fonts finally spelled sure (but nevertheless still slow) end of YUSCII.
Codepage layout
Code points remained largely the same as in ASCII to maintain maximum compatibility. Following table shows allocation of character codes in YUSCII. Red entries are (somewhat) different from ASCII. Both Latin and Cyrillic glyphs are shown:
Printable Representation, the Unicode glyphs reserved for representing control characters when it is necessary to print or display them rather than have them perform their intended function.
Control key Sequence, the traditional key sequences for inputting control characters. The caret (^) represents the "Control" or "Ctrl" key that must be held down while pressing the second key in the sequence. The caret-key representation is also used by some software to represent control characters.
The Backspace character can also be entered by pressing the "Backspace", "Bksp", or ← key on some systems.
The Delete character can also be entered by pressing the "Delete" or "Del" key. It can also be entered by pressing the "Backspace", "Bksp", or ← key on some systems.
The Escape character can also be entered by pressing the "Escape" or "Esc" key on some systems.
The Carriage Return character can also be entered by pressing the "Return", "Ret", "Enter", or ↵ key on most systems.
The ambiguity surrounding the Backspace key comes from systems that translated the DEL control character into a BS (backspace) before transmitting it. Some software was unable to process the character and would display "^H" instead.