In Computing, What is ANSI?

In Computing, What is ANSI?

ANSI normally refers to the legacy standard codepage on Windows.  Technically speaking, it may also referred to as Windows-1252.  (Specifically on Western U.S. systems, it's also been represented as other Windows codepages on other systems)  ANSI encoding would be an extension of the ASCII character set with additional 128 character codes.  ASCII encoding is 7-bit where as ANSI is 8-bit. 

Most will argue that the term ANSI encoding is misrepresented.  Since the term ANSI is actually used for several different encodings.  Example:  ISO 8859-1, Windows CP1252, or the current system encoding on a Windows computer. 

Learn more about this author on Google+.