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.
[1] Created around the same time and addressing some of the same problems, LMBCS could be viewed as parallel development and possible alternative to Unicode.
[5] LMBCS is also used in IBM/Lotus SmartSuite, Notes and Domino,[1] as well as in a number of third-party products.
LMBCS encodes the characters required for languages using the Latin,[6] Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Cyrillic[6] scripts, the Thai, Chinese, Japanese[6] and Korean writing systems, and technical symbols.
[1] Lotus 1-2-3 retrieves the optimization group code from the file header of the corresponding source file,[7] whereas for Lotus Notes the optimization group code is fixed to be always 01hex.