The Xerox Character Code Standard (XCCS) is a historical 16-bit character encoding that was created by Xerox in 1980 for the exchange of information between elements of the Xerox Network Systems Architecture. It encodes the characters required for languages using the Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Cyrillic scripts, the Chinese, Japanese and Korean writing systems, and technical symbols. It can be viewed as an early precursor of, and inspiration for, the Unicode Standard. The International Character Set (ICS) is compatible with XCCS.