AVATAR (terminal protocol)
A leaner alternative to ANSI escape codes for BBS graphics, designed so coloured menus would arrive before the caller lost patience on a slow modem.
George A. Stanislav described the Advanced Video Attribute Terminal Assembler and Recreator in FSC-0025 in 1989. Where ANSI needed something like ESC[1;33;44m to change colour, AVATAR made do with ^V^A plus one attribute byte. The base level, AVT/0, also had a repeat command, ^Y, which wrote the same character N times — simple run-length encoding that shrank borders and filled areas considerably.
Opus, Maximus and several other BBS packages supported it, and terminals such as Telix could display it. But ANSI had already won, through ANSI.SYS on every DOS machine and through the ANSI art scene, which drew for the format everyone could open. AVATAR became the technically better option that mostly lived in settings menus.