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From: gwyn@brl-tgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn <gwyn>)
Newsgroups: net.info-terms
Subject: Re: ASCII and ANSI terminals, what is the difference??
Message-ID: <711@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Sun, 15-Dec-85 19:38:27 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.711
Posted: Sun Dec 15 19:38:27 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 17-Dec-85 07:25:26 EST
References: <491@sdcc12.UUCP> <138@rruxo.UUCP>
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab
Lines: 15

Strictly speaking, ASCII is the American Standard Code for
Information Interchange, of which there is actually more
than one version (I think the last one was in 1968, but I'm
not sure).  This is a character code used almost everywhere
except in mainframe markets (although IBM was a participant
in establishing the first ASCII spec, they went off and
introduced EBCDIC instead of conforming to the standard).

ANSI is the American National Standards Institute.  The
appellation "ANSI" applied to terminals is normally short
for "ANSI X3.64-conforming", and indicates at least a subset
of the X3.64 escape sequences are supported by the terminal.
This in itself doesn't mean much, but for marketing reasons
most so-called "ANSI" terminals are nearly compatible with
the DEC VT-100.