ANSI.SYS
More info
- Creator
- Microsoft
- Released
- 1983
- Type
- Device driver
- Platform
- MS-DOS
The DOS driver that interpreted ANSI escape sequences, and so made colour, cursor movement and animated text graphics possible in the console.
Loaded via DEVICE=ANSI.SYS in CONFIG.SYS, it caught escape codes in output and turned them into cursor commands and colour changes — the basis for a BBS drawing menus and for ANSI art being animated character by character. It shipped with MS-DOS 2.0 in 1983 and turned the text screen into a canvas.
The price was speed: the driver parsed one character at a time, so the scene and the BBS world happily switched to faster replacements like NANSI.SYS. When the Windows NT-line console dropped support, PC ANSI slowly withered — the art still sat in the files, but nothing was left to draw it.