Old ASCII Protocol Question Avatar
For those who remember the Avatar protocol (I'm sure that was his name). I am trying to find information on this. All I've found so far is that it is an ANSI style compression protocol, done by compressing common ANSI escape sequences.
But on the same day (early 90s) I swore I remember that it was used to compress ASCII text for modems like the early 2400 BIS baud modems. (I don't remember all protocol versions, names, etc., then sorry).
In any case, it made reading messages and using remote wrappers much nicer due to the speed of display. It did nothing to transfer files, and what not, it was just a way to compress ASCII text as little as possible.
I'm trying to do some research on this topic and thought this is a good place to start looking. I think the protocol used every trick in the book to compress ASCII, like replacing a regular word with one byte, or maybe even a little.
I don't remember the ratio you could get from it, but as far as I remember, it was pretty decent.
Anyone have any information on this? Compressing ASCII text to less than 7 bits or protocol information on an avatar or maybe even an answer to the question if it even DID any of the ASCII compression I'm talking about?
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Wikipedia has something about the AVATAR Protocol :
The AVATAR protocol (Extended Video Attribute Terminal Assembler and Recreator) is a sequence escape system sometimes used on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). It has basically the same functionality as the more popular ANSI exit codes, but has the advantage that the escape sequence is much shorter. AVATAR can thus make colored text and artwork much faster over slow connections.
The protocol is defined by the FidoNet proposal of the technical standard FSC-0025.
Avatar was later expanded later 1989 to AVT / 0 (sometimes referred to as AVT / 0 +), which included objects for scrolling through areas of the screen (useful for split-screen chat or full-screen mailers), as well as more complex template compression.
The Avatar was originally implemented in the Opus BBS, but later Remote Access. RemoteAccess came with the AVTCONV utility, which made it easy to translate ANSI documents into Avatar assisting its adoption.
also:
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If I recall correctly, the avatar compression scheme was a simple kind of RLE (Run-Length Encoding) that would compress duplicate lines of the same characters to something smaller. Unfortunately I don't remember the details.
Have you checked AVATAR on Wikipedia?
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