:ANSI: /an'see/ 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 X.364 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 X.364
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.

:AOS: 1. /aws/ (East Coast), /ay'os/ (West Coast) /vt. obs./
To increase the amount of something. "AOS the campfire."
[based on a PDP-10 increment instruction] Usage:
considered silly, and now obsolete. Now largely supplanted by
{bump}. See {SOS}. 2. /n./ A {{Multics}}-derived OS