ANSI

ANSI n. /an'see/  1. n. The American National Standards
   Institue. ANSI, along with the International Standards Organization
   (ISO) standardized the C programming language (see {K&R},
   {Classic C}), and promulgates many other important software
   standards.  2. n. [BBS] 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 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.