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ansitable gets its name from the use of ANSI commands to control the color, style of text on the screen. ANSI commands are a very general mechanism that allow for the control of text color, style and position on the screen. They are encoded by a variable-length sequence that begins with an ESCape character (0x1b) which is why they are commonly known as "escape sequences". Escape sequences date back to the era of physical hardware terminals such as the DEC VT100 and many others. Each manufacturer used different encoding, but a long standardization process by ECMA (Europe) and ANSI (USA) means that today these commands are universal and described by pervasive standards (ANSI X3.64, ECA-48, ISO/IEC 6429). They are supported by many terminal emulators and onscreen consoles. ansitable uses the Python colored packge to generate the appropriate escape sequences.

The package also makes use of box drawing characters which first appeared in the original IBM PC and other early PCs. In the era of physical terminals they were selected by special escape sequences. Today these characters are standardized by a block of code points within the Unicode character set

(from wikimedia commons)

and by judicious placement can be used to make nice looking tables. These unicode characters are not strictly "ANSI", they are defined by the Unicode Consortium and is synchronised with ISO/IEC 10646 standard.