Apple II character set

The Apple II character set was based on ASCII, but as with other small computers of the day, it had a few platform-specific quirks.

It was a 7-bit character set, with the 8th bit used for other purposes in input and output such as denoting inverse video or keyboard buffering.

In the original Apple II models, only uppercase letters were used, with the lowercase letters displaying as punctuation from elsewhere in ASCII. Later models (starting with the IIe) had lowercase support (and there were third-party addons to add this capability to older Apples).

Early Apples had left and right arrows, with up and down arrows being added in later models. These keys mapped onto characters in the C0 controls range. Other control characters used in the Apple included CR (0D) used as a newline and ENTER character, BEL (07) which sounded the Apple speaker (the "G" key was marked "BELL" in the earliest Apples to suggest this use for Ctrl-G), and Ctrl-D (04) which signified that what followed was a DOS command.