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 X.364 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 X.364 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.
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