From Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001) [jargon]:
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.
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03) [foldoc]:
ANSI {American National Standards Institute}
From Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms (Version 1.9, June 2002) [vera]:
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