ASCII 14 — SO

Shift Out (SO) switches the output device to an alternate character set, enabling access to additional symbols or glyphs beyond the default set. Together with Shift In (SI), SO created an early mechanism for character set switching on devices that needed more than 128 symbols. This concept evolved into modern encoding systems like ISO 2022, which uses escape sequences for switching between character sets. In VT100-compatible terminal emulators, SO activates the alternate G1 graphics character set for drawing box-drawing characters.

Control characters were defined in the original 1963 ASCII standard to manage telecommunications equipment and terminal devices. Unlike printable characters representing visible symbols, control codes perform actions: initiating transmissions, acknowledging received data, triggering device alerts, and structuring information hierarchically. Of ASCII's 128 code points, 33 are designated as control characters (codes 0–31 plus 127), reflecting the standard's deep roots in telegraphy and serial communication systems. While most control codes have fallen out of daily use, several remain essential to modern computing workflows.

In the ASCII encoding table, Shift Out is assigned code point 14 in decimal (0x0E hexadecimal, 016 octal, 00001110 binary). The 7-bit ASCII standard, first published in 1963 by the American Standards Association, defines exactly 128 characters that remain the foundation of text encoding systems worldwide. UTF-8, the dominant encoding on the modern web, is fully backward compatible with ASCII — every ASCII character is encoded as the identical single byte in UTF-8, guaranteeing that Shift Out works reliably across all operating systems, programming languages, and internet protocols.