History
Almost all manufacturers of video terminals added vendor-specific escape sequences to do operations such as placing the cursor at arbitrary positions on the screen. As these sequences were all different, elaborate libraries such as termcap had to be created so programs could use the same API for all of them. In addition, most designs required sending numbers (such as row & column) as the binary values of the characters; for some programming languages and for systems that did not use ASCII internally it was often difficult or impossible to turn a number into the correct character.
The first standard for ANSI escape sequences was ECMA-48, adopted in 1976. It was a continuation of a series of character coding standards, the first one being ECMA-6 from 1961, a 7-bit standard from which ASCII originates. ECMA-48 has been updated several times and the current edition is the 5th from 1991. It is also adopted by ISO and IEC as standard ISO/IEC 6429. The name "ANSI escape sequence" dates from 1981 when ANSI adopted ECMA-48 as the standard ANSI X3.64 (and later, in 1997, withdrew it).
The first popular video terminal to support these sequences was the Digital VT100 introduced in 1978, which sparked a variety of "clones", among the earliest and most popular of which was the much more affordable Zenith Z-19 in 1979. The popularity of these gradually led to more and more software (especially bulletin board systems) assuming the escape sequences worked, leading to almost all new terminals and emulator programs supporting them.
Read more about this topic: ANSI Escape Code
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