ANSI art is a computer art form that was widely used at one time on
BBSes. It is similar to
ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols — all codes found in IBM
code page 437, often referred to as
extended ASCII and used in
MS-DOS and
Unix environments. ANSI art also contains special
ANSI escape sequences that color text with the 16 foreground and 8 background colours offered by
ANSI.SYS, an MS-DOS
device driver loosely based upon the
ANSI X3.64 standard for
text terminals. Some ANSI artists take advantage of the cursor control sequences within ANSI X3.64 in order to create animations, commonly referred to as
ANSImations. ANSI art and text files which incorporate ANSI codes carry the
de facto .ANS file extension.