display | more...

ANSI stands for the American National Standards Institute, but their most interesting proclamation pertains to the establishment of the standard for character sets in PCs. These formatting standards allowed low-resolution pictures to be created by arranging blocks on the screen in delightful patterns. See: underground BBS scenes, #ansi, www.acheron.org, Mistigris

ANSI stands for the American National Standards Institute. One of their standards includes the PC character and escape sequence set.
Using 1 of 16 colours for the foreground and 1 of 8 for the background of each char, especially those below, provides a limited but sufficient palette to draw pictures. People drawing ansi have spawned the art scene.
  1. 176, 177, and 178, which are the three "shaded" chars
  2. 219, the full char
  3. 220, 221, 222 and 223, the half-filled chars.
annoyware = A = ANSI standard

ANSI /an'see/

1. n. [techspeak] The American National Standards Institute. ANSI, along with the International Organization for Standards (ISO), standardized the C programming language (see K&R, Classic C), and promulgates many other important software standards. 2. n. [techspeak] A terminal may be said to be `ANSI' if it meets the ANSI X3.64 standard for terminal control. Unfortunately, this standard was both over-complicated and too permissive. It has been retired and replaced by the ECMA-48 standard, which shares both flaws. 3. n. [BBS jargon] The set of screen-painting codes that most MS-DOS and Amiga computers accept. This comes from the ANSI.SYS device driver that must be loaded on an MS-DOS computer to view such codes. Unfortunately, neither DOS ANSI nor the BBS ANSIs derived from it exactly match the ANSI X3.64 terminal standard. For example, the ESC-[1m code turns on the bold highlight on large machines, but in IBM PC/MS-DOS ANSI, it turns on `intense' (bright) colors. Also, in BBS-land, the term `ANSI' is often used to imply that a particular computer uses or can emulate the IBM high-half character set from MS-DOS. Particular use depends on context. Occasionally, the vanilla ASCII character set is used with the color codes, but on BBSs, ANSI and `IBM characters' tend to go together.

