[6] Code page 850 differs from code page 437 in that many of the box-drawing characters, Greek letters, and various symbols were replaced with additional Latin letters with diacritics, thus greatly improving support for Western European languages (all characters from ISO 8859-1 are included).

After the DOS era, successor operating systems largely replaced code page 850 with Windows-1252,[b] later UCS-2 and UTF-16,[c] and finally UTF-8.

However, legacy applications, especially command-line programs, may still depend on support for older code pages.

[12][13][14] Unlike most code pages modified to support the euro sign, the generic currency sign at CFhex was not chosen as the character to replace (compare ISO-8859-15 (from ISO-8859-1), code pages 808 (from 866), 848 (from 1125), 849 (from 1131) and 872 (from 855), ISO-IR-205 (from ISO-8859-4), ISO-IR-206 (from ISO-8859-13), and the changes to MacRoman and MacCyrillic).

[15][16][17][18][19] The reason for this might have been due to restrictions in MS-DOS/PC DOS, which limited .CPI files to 64 KB in size or about six codepages maximum.