Hi
A codepage is simply a table of characters that can be represented by the 0..255 byte values of one single byte ~ /old-school/
In the DOS-days we used e.g.: CP850 a lot, then came windows and we used CP-1252 a lot, then windows switched to 'mbcs' ~ min 2 bytes per char/codepoint ~ UTF16 ~ WideString. Nowadays windows too supports UTF8.
This codepage / unicode stuff is a huge technical field, with lots of research and work going into it.
example:
Text: Peña
text sgl-byte multi-byte
P 1 1
e 1 1
ñ 1 #nnn 2 #C3nn
a 1 1
------------------------------
4 4 5
In multi-byte, all the ascii chars (0..127) are the same as in single-byte.
HTH
Regards Benny