The Lotus International Character Set (LICS) is a proprietary single-byte character encoding introduced in 1985 by Lotus Development Corporation.
It is based on the 1983 DEC Multinational Character Set (MCS) for VT220 terminals.
LICS was first introduced as the character set of Lotus 1-2-3 Release 2 for DOS in 1985.
It was also utilized in a number of third-party spreadsheet products emulating the file format.
[11] For some characters the table also lists dedicated Lotus 1-2-3 compose key sequences to ease character input beyond the Alt Numpad input method.