I promise this will grow, as needed.
Also, I see no reason to duplicate the definitions you can find in other places (not to mention the copyright issues :-)). So, a good starting place is the glossary of terms of the MS Global Development site.
- ANSI
- Acronym for the “American National Standards Institute.”
- ANSI code page
- The term is a misnomer. It is used in the Windows community and it means “the default system code page.” It is 1252 for English and Western European languages, but it is 1250 for Cyrillic, 932 for Japan, 950 for Traditional Chinese, and so on.
The source of this comes from the fact that the Windows code page 1252 was originally based on an ANSI draft-which became International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Standard 8859-1. - ANSI application
- Application calling the non-Unicode version of Windows API and code pages encoded strings.
- OEM
- Acronym for “Original Equipment Manufacturer.”
- OEM code page
- Means “the code page used for MS-DOS, console applications.
Historically this was the code page used by MS-DOS. Probably because the localized versions of MS-DOS where originally developed for a certain OEM. - Unicode
- A universal character encoding trying to encode world’s scripts. It is developed and maintained by the Unicode Consortium.
- Unicode application
- Application calling the Unicode version of Windows API and Unicode encoded strings.