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American National Standard

(ANS) A common prefix for ANSI documents or standards, e.g.: "ANS Forth", or "American National Standard X3.215-1994".

Last updated: 1998-07-01

American National Standards Institute

(ANSI) The private, non-profit organisation (501(c)3) responsible for approving US standards in many areas, including computers and communications. ANSI is a member of ISO. ANSI sells ANSI and ISO (international) standards.

ANSI Home.

Address: New York, NY 10036, USA. Sales: 1430 Broadway, NY NY 10018. Telephone: +1 (212) 642 4900.

Last updated: 2004-01-14

American Society of Mechanical Engineers

<body>

(ASME) A group involved in CAD standardisation.

Last updated: 1995-04-21

American Standard Code for Information Interchange

<character, standard>

The basis of character sets used in almost all present-day computers. US-ASCII uses only the lower seven bits (character points 0 to 127) to convey some control codes, space, numbers, most basic punctuation, and unaccented letters a-z and A-Z. More modern coded character sets (e.g., Latin-1, Unicode) define extensions to ASCII for values above 127 for conveying special Latin characters (like accented characters, or German ess-tsett), characters from non-Latin writing systems (e.g., Cyrillic, or Han characters), and such desirable glyphs as distinct open- and close-quotation marks. ASCII replaced earlier systems such as EBCDIC and Baudot, which used fewer bytes, but were each broken in their own way.

Computers are much pickier about spelling than humans; thus, hackers need to be very precise when talking about characters, and have developed a considerable amount of verbal shorthand for them. Every character has one or more names - some formal, some concise, some silly.

Individual characters are listed in this dictionary with alternative names from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII pronunciation guide in rough order of popularity, including their official ITU-T names and the particularly silly names introduced by INTERCAL.

See V ampersand, asterisk, back quote, backslash, caret, colon, comma, commercial at, control-C, dollar, dot, double quote, equals, exclamation mark, greater than, hash, left bracket, left parenthesis, less than, minus, parentheses, oblique stroke, percent, plus, question mark, right brace, right brace, right bracket, right parenthesis, semicolon, single quote, space, tilde, underscore, vertical bar, zero.

Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The "#", "$", ">", and "&" characters, for example, were all pronounced "hex" in different communities because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in particular, "#" in many assembler-programming cultures, "$" in the 6502 world, ">" at Texas Instruments, and "&" on the BBC Micro, Acorn Archimedes, Sinclair, and some Zilog Z80 machines). See also splat.

The inability of US-ASCII to correctly represent nearly any language other than English became an obvious and intolerable misfeature as computer use outside the US and UK became the rule rather than the exception (see software rot). And so national extensions to US-ASCII were developed, such as Latin-1.

Hardware and software from the US continued for some time to embody the assumption that US-ASCII is the universal character set and that words of text consist entirely of byte values 65-90 and 97-122 (A-Z and a-z); this is a major irritant to people who want to use a character set suited to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem by proliferating sets of national characters produced an evolutionary pressure (especially in protocol design, e.g., the URL standard) to stick to US-ASCII as a subset common to all those in use, and therefore to stick to English as the language encodable with the common subset of all the ASCII dialects. This basic problem with having a multiplicity of national character sets ended up being a prime justification for Unicode, which was designed, ostensibly, to be the *one* ASCII extension anyone will need.

A system is described as "eight-bit clean" if it doesn't mangle text with byte values above 127, as some older systems did.

Last updated: 2014-10-05

American Telephone and Telegraph, Inc.

<company, telecommunications, Unix>

(AT&T) One of the largest US telecommunications providers, also noted for being the birthplace of the Unix operating system and the C and C++ programming languages.

AT&T was incorporated in 1885, but traces its lineage to Alexander Graham Bell and his invention of the telephone in 1876. As parent company of the former Bell System, AT&T's primary mission was to provide telephone service to virtually everyone in the United States. In its first 50 years, AT&T established subsidiaries and allied companies in more than a dozen other countries. It sold these interests in 1925 and focused on achieving its mission in the United States. It did, however, continue to provide international long distance service.

The Bell System was dissolved at the end of 1983 with AT&T's divestiture of the Bell telephone companies.

AT&T split into three parts in 1996, one of which is Lucent Tecnologies, the former systems and equipment portion of AT&T (including Bell Laboratories).

AT&T Home.

Last updated: 2002-06-21

American Wire Gauge

<hardware, standard>

(AWG, sometimes "Brown and Sharpe Wire Gauge") A U.S. standard set of non-ferrous wire conductor sizes. Typical household wiring is AWG number 12 or 14. Telephone wire is usually 22, 24, or 26. The higher the gauge number, the smaller the diameter and the thinner the wire. Thicker wire is better for long distances due to its lower resistance per unit length.

Last updated: 2001-03-26

America On-Line, Inc.

<company, communications>

(AOL) A US on-line service provider based in Vienna, Virginia, USA. AOL claims to be the largest and fastest growing provider of on-line services in the world, with the most active subscriber base. AOL offers its three million subscribers electronic mail, interactive newspapers and magazines, conferencing, software libraries, computing support, and on-line classes.

In October 1994 AOL made Internet FTP available to its members and in May 1995, full Internet access including web.

AOL's main competitors are Prodigy and Compuserve.

http://aol.com/.

Last updated: 1997-08-26

America's Multimedia Online

<company, web>

(AMO) An Internet technologies company which invented Never Offline in 1995 and was officially started in 1996.

http://amo.net/.

E-mail: AMO <[email protected]>.

Address: Albuquerque, NM, USA.

Last updated: 1999-11-03

Nearby terms:

American National Standard ♦ American National Standards Institute

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