The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is a private, non-profit standards organization that produces industrial standards in the United States. It is a member of ISO and IEC.

ANSI's standards fall in many areas. In computing, ANSI standardized the ASCII character set in X3.4, control codes in X3.41 and control sequences (to be used e.g. for moving the cursor around the screen of a "dumb" terminal) in X3.64.

The ASA photographic exposure system became the basis for the ISO film speed system, currently used worldwide.

ANSI was founded on October 19, 1918 as the American Engineering Standards Committee and reorganised as the American Standards Association in 1928. In 1966 it was reorganised as the United States of America Standards Institute. In 1969 it changed its name to American National Standards Institute.

In Microsoft Windows, the phrase "ANSI" also refers to any of the national character encodings supported by the system, in North America and Western Europe, CP1252. These are similar to ISO 8859, leading many to falsely assume that they are identical.

ASCII art which is colorized or animated by way of ANSI terminal control codes (X3.64 sequences) are commonly referred to as "ANSI art" and were predominantly popular throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

See also

• ANSI art, art created from a subset of X3.64
• ANSI.SYS, device driver for MS-DOS
• Unified Thread Standard
• American National Standards Institute Nanotechnology Panel

External links

• ANSI's official site (http://www.ansi.org/)
• About ANSI Overview, from ANSI web site, as of March 2, 2003; [1] (http://www.ansi.org/about_ansi/overview/overview.aspx?menuid=1)
• ANSI - an Historical Overview, from ANSI web site, as of March 2, 2003; [2] (http://www.ansi.org/about_ansi/introduction/history.aspx?menuid=1)