Alphabet ascribed to missionary Cyril (ninth century), developed from Greek for church literature in Russian. Now the alphabet of the Soviet republics, Serbia, and Bulgaria, it is one of the three principal alphabets of the world.
There are several different coding systems for Cyrillic characters (Russian). Most important are the KOI-8 Unix standard, and CP-1225, primarily used for Microsoft Windows. Cyrillic fonts and keyboard maps are available from several sources. See http://www.free.net/Docs/cyrillic/notes.en.html for information.