[W/K] :: ANSI

  ANSI
       American National Standard Institute (org., USA)
       
       

  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.
  
  

  ANSI
       
          American National Standards Institute