Code page 850 is a code page that was used in western Europe, under systems such as DOS. It was also sometimes used on English DOS systems although CP437 was generally the default on those. It was largely replaced first with windows-1252 (often mislabeled as ISO-8859-1) and later by UCS-2 and finally UTF-16 (while the NT line was natively unicode from the start issues of development tool support and compatibility with windows 9x kept most applications on the 8 bit code pages). According to Microsoft, it is obsolete and unsupported.

CP850 differs from CP437 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). At the same time, the changes frequently caused display glitches in programs that actually made use of the box drawing characters to display a GUI-like surface in text mode, such as the ubiquitous Turbo Pascal.

A modification of CP850 is CP858, differing only in the character at position D5HEX: a dotless-i (?) in CP850, which is replaced with a euro sign in CP858.

There is a popular varation, where characters 0xDD (?) and 0xDE (?) are replaced with broken bar (|) and I with grave (Ì).