ASCII + ANSI - A Love of technology (Part 2)
This post is 100% power up.
One must consider that my research is for the most part being done on the spot for at least some of this knowledge. For which I will obviously cite sources at the end of this document.
My exposure to any of this at least in any in depth didn't come about until 1996 when I was eleven years old. Before that point these standards where busy being developed and have continued to do so since. For example as I stated in my last article the ASCII character set standards where not truly developed until 1960 and not ratified until 1963. ANSI standards are even newer then that the first standard of which was not adopted until 1976 a full thirteen years later.
The basic purpose of the first standard of ANSI (character encoding ECMA-48) was to standardise an escape sequence which would perform arbitrary operations such as placing the cursor at a specified location on the screen or designate the colour of a set of text.
16 bit colour encoding allowed by the ANSI ECMA-48 character set
Of course my realisation that there was no standardised way to communicate a cursor movement has only come with my research, it seems beautiful to me that the ANSI standard, when I was young loved so much is actually much more powerful and was at its time much more revolutionary then I knew.
In almost any text based game colour is the difference between night and day as you can see from these samples of Materia Magica.
Thank you for reading! Primary information was garnered from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code
This has been part two of a two part series (thus far) if you missed part one check it out here:
https://steemit.com/art/@raymonjohnstone/ascii-a-love-of-technology
And if you have suggestions for further please feel free to leave a comment.
And as always don't forget to
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Gaming in the 90's was its peak, IMO. Nothing beats the final fantasy , mega man, and mario series of old, just to name a few.
Yeppers gotta love it bro.
ASCII and ANSI were also heavily used in BBS door games of the early '90s:
http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/340587/the-forgotten-world-of-bbs-door-games
And evolved into some telnet games during the mid to late 90's. I remember being hooked on http://3k.org for years after discovering it at college in '95.