Glossary

A short reference for reading the rest of this site.

ANSI

The X3.64 escape-sequence standard that lets text terminals position the cursor, change colour, and blink. The canvas ANSI artists drew on.

ASCII art

Art made from the 95 printable 7-bit ASCII characters. Older, plainer sibling of ANSI; runs anywhere a monospaced font does.

Baud

Unit of signalling rate. A 28800-baud modem could deliver about 3.5 kB/s of actual bytes, less with overhead.

BBS

Bulletin Board System. A computer running terminal software that users dialled into over a modem to post messages and exchange files.

Door

A game or external program a BBS would hand a user off to — Legend of the Red Dragon, Trade Wars, Barren Realms Elite.

Echomail

A store-and-forward message-exchange network (mostly FidoNet) that let messages posted on one board propagate to thousands of others overnight.

Sysop

System operator. The person who ran a BBS; often from their own bedroom, often losing the family phone line to it.

Warez

Illegally distributed commercial software. Much of the motivation for faster modems and bigger file areas. Not a part of this archive.