AVATAR
Overview
Escape sequence
An escape sequence is a series of characters used to change the state of computers and their attached peripheral devices. These are also known as control sequences, reflecting their use in device control. Some control sequences are special characters that always have the same meaning...
s occasionally used on Bulletin Board System
Bulletin board system
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...
s (BBSes). It has largely the same functionality as the more popular ANSI escape code
ANSI escape code
ANSI escape sequences are characters embedded in the text used to control formatting, color, and other output options on video text terminals. Almost all terminal emulators designed to show text output from a remote computer, and to show text output from local software, interpret at least some of...
s, but has the advantage that the escape sequences are much shorter. AVATAR can thus render colored text and artwork
ASCII art
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters...
much faster over slow connections.
The protocol is defined by FidoNet
FidoNet
FidoNet is a worldwide computer network that is used for communication between bulletin board systems. It was most popular in the early to mid 1990s, prior to the introduction of easy and affordable access to the Internet...
technical standard proposal FSC-0025.
Avatar was later extended in late 1989 to AVT/0 (sometimes referred to as AVT/0+) which included facilities to scroll areas of the screen (useful for split screen chat, or full screen mail writing programs), as well as more advanced pattern compression.
Avatar was originally implemented in the Opus BBS, but later popularised by RemoteAccess
RemoteAccess
RemoteAccess is a DOS Bulletin Board System software package written by Andrew Milner and was published by his company Wantree Development in Australia. RemoteAccess was written in Turbo Pascal with some Assembly Language routines. RemoteAccess began in 1989 as a clone of QuickBBS by Adam Hudson...
.
