6 ms·

ANSI Art Collection from Old BBSs

84 points by FreakyT 11y ago

acomjean 11y ago
I got confused because ANSI is not the same as ASCII. These are color and have more graphical symbols. Interesting but different. Hint: Click on the [?] next to each file, the ans file doesn't render happy in the browser.
- orionblastar 11y ago
  In DOS you needed to load ANSI.SYS in your CONFIG.SYS file in order to see ANSI terminal codes. Later on PC Magazine or some other company made ANSI.COM that you could load at any time as a Terminate and Stay Resident program to see ANSI codes. It basically uses the CGA 80x25 text 16 color screen on PC and PC clones. I could be wrong, but I think the terminal codes were based on VT-100 or something with the IBM font added. When I had an Amiga 1000 I had to set my terminal to VT-100 and load a font that had the IBM PC character set in it, because the Amiga fonts had different character sets in them that didn't look right. Modern terminal programs for BBSes are like this one: http://syncterm.bbsdev.net/ http://syncterm.bbsdev.net/ It fully support BBS ANSI codes. It also lets you connect to Internet based Telnet BBS systems.
  - micro-ram 11y ago
    DesqView had DVANSI.COM IIRC
- userbinator 11y ago
  These have ANSI terminal escape sequences in them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code
- jquast 11y ago
  I wrote a document trying to clarify the meaning of 'ANSI', which is a misnomer of sorts, https://github.com/erikrose/blessings/blob/blessed-integration/docs/pains.rst#the-misnomer-of-ansi https://github.com/erikrose/blessings/blob/blessed-integrati...
  - aries1980 11y ago
    >This is purely an American misnomer, because early IBM PC and clones in the European nations did not ship with the IBM CP437 code page by default. A Hungarian ANSI guy here. In Central/Eastern Europe we used the IBM CP852 which only tweaked some of the already accented characters to the language correct one. So we still had ANSI scene with the 8bit block characters.
empire29 11y ago
http://sixteencolors.net/ http://sixteencolors.net/ is another great archive for ANSi art. The art scene in the mid 90s was an interesting, vibrant, microcosm, moving from BBS's to IRC over the course of a few years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILNs1GChGDk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILNs1GChGDk and the longer http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ are a good watches if youre interested.
shon 11y ago
Textfiles.com is awesome. It's one of Jason Scott's first creations. He's also involved in Archive.org's browser-playable DOS game archive at https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games And an all around good egg.
kw71 11y ago
Need more ANSI from The Floating Pancreas, which was a rather unique BBS that served up a lot of textfiles back in the day. How could it be omitted?
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  If no one archived it, it's gone. If no one submitted it to an archive, it's hard to find. If someone saved it to a floppy disk, it's probably gone [1] [1]: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191
  - empressplay 11y ago
    That article's a bit melodramatic -- I have Apple II floppies from the mid 1980s that still read fine. They just need to have been stored properly.
- fizzacyst 11y ago
  Wow! FpG mentioned on Hacker News. Whoda thunk? Unique is one way to describe it. I have an archive of some (sadly, not all) of our stuff, but after looking through it just now there's a lot that isn't exactly, um, appropriate? I guess the whole point was to be shocking but, if I'm honest, the tables have turned. A lot of it offends and embarrasses /me/ now. Older, wiser, less acid... Were you a regular?
  - kw71 11y ago
    Lol! Less acid. I called frequently. I remember having a chat session with the sysop and was amazed that he could type rapidly in that funky mixed-case all the time. Maybe he had a foot pedal for a shift key?
chjj 11y ago
This is gold to my inner terminal nerd. I made a simple terminal ANSI art viewer just for this: https://github.com/chjj/blessed/tree/master/example/ansi-viewer https://github.com/chjj/blessed/tree/master/example/ansi-vie...
- karmakaze 11y ago
  Niice. Looks way better than `curl -si <url>`. Thanks!
donflamenco 11y ago
Brings back old memories of TheDraw in the DOS days. Made some ANSI art back for some pirate boards in the early 90s. Someone archived it and I was able to find one of the ones I did. http://imgur.com/tscJzzs http://imgur.com/tscJzzs If your interested in looking at amazing ones, look for Jed from the ACID group (or others?) His stuff was amazing. I wonder what he is doing now.
- teamhappy 11y ago
  Here they are: http://www.acid.org/ http://www.acid.org/ Also: http://www.chemical-reaction.org/ http://www.chemical-reaction.org/
sjs382 11y ago
Also, http://artpacks.org http://artpacks.org
- lloyddobbler 11y ago
  I was gonna say - textfiles.com has some good examples of 'what is ANSI art?', but to really get down into 'What's the big deal?', people need to see the iCE, ACiD, and RELiC packs from circa 1993-94. Glad someone's collected those.
- kristopolous 11y ago
  Why a native phone app? Isn't this a gallery of images? Am I missing something (other than just for the fun of it)?
- aw3c2 11y ago
  Does that site seriously have no scrollbar while scrolling one line at a time or is my browser broken?
grumblestumble 11y ago
I remember when I switched from TheDraw to the amazing new technology of RIPScript, which was like some insanely convoluted svg precursor, but allowed for some pretty metal vector graphix loading screens. http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/PROGRAMS/GRAPHICS/RIPSCRIPT/ http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/PROGRAMS/GRAPHICS/RIPS... Then about five years ago I started switching all my web development away from pngs and gifs to svgs. The more things change...
Flenser 11y ago
In the early days of the web I remember seeing an ASCII art pheonix made of (if I remember correctly) AGCT dna-like sequences. It rendered really slowly in netscape. I'd love to know how today's browsers handle it but alas it is lost in time...
dasil003 11y ago
Looking at some of those gave me a visceral impulse to play some door games.
jquast 11y ago
also http://textmod.es/ http://textmod.es/
waitingkuo 11y ago
Believe or not, telnet://ptt.cc , one of the bbs in Taiwan, is still highly active with more than 100k concurrent users normally.
- vansonlin 11y ago
  it's crazy, isn't it lol. (I am Taiwanese, who is actively using PTT
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
edmanet 11y ago
Brings me back to the days when I had a 300baud modem on my C-64 and tied up the phone line for hours at a time.

84 points by FreakyT 11y ago

I got confused because ANSI is not the same as ASCII. These are color and have more graphical symbols. Interesting but different. Hint: Click on the [?] next to each file, the ans file doesn't render happy in the browser.

orionblastar 11y ago
In DOS you needed to load ANSI.SYS in your CONFIG.SYS file in order to see ANSI terminal codes. Later on PC Magazine or some other company made ANSI.COM that you could load at any time as a Terminate and Stay Resident program to see ANSI codes. It basically uses the CGA 80x25 text 16 color screen on PC and PC clones. I could be wrong, but I think the terminal codes were based on VT-100 or something with the IBM font added. When I had an Amiga 1000 I had to set my terminal to VT-100 and load a font that had the IBM PC character set in it, because the Amiga fonts had different character sets in them that didn't look right. Modern terminal programs for BBSes are like this one: http://syncterm.bbsdev.net/ http://syncterm.bbsdev.net/ It fully support BBS ANSI codes. It also lets you connect to Internet based Telnet BBS systems.
- micro-ram 11y ago
  DesqView had DVANSI.COM IIRC
userbinator 11y ago
These have ANSI terminal escape sequences in them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code
jquast 11y ago
I wrote a document trying to clarify the meaning of 'ANSI', which is a misnomer of sorts, https://github.com/erikrose/blessings/blob/blessed-integration/docs/pains.rst#the-misnomer-of-ansi https://github.com/erikrose/blessings/blob/blessed-integrati...
- aries1980 11y ago
  >This is purely an American misnomer, because early IBM PC and clones in the European nations did not ship with the IBM CP437 code page by default. A Hungarian ANSI guy here. In Central/Eastern Europe we used the IBM CP852 which only tweaked some of the already accented characters to the language correct one. So we still had ANSI scene with the 8bit block characters.

empire29 11y ago

http://sixteencolors.net/ http://sixteencolors.net/ is another great archive for ANSi art. The art scene in the mid 90s was an interesting, vibrant, microcosm, moving from BBS's to IRC over the course of a few years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILNs1GChGDk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILNs1GChGDk and the longer http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ are a good watches if youre interested.

shon 11y ago

Textfiles.com is awesome. It's one of Jason Scott's first creations. He's also involved in Archive.org's browser-playable DOS game archive at https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games And an all around good egg.

kw71 11y ago

Need more ANSI from The Floating Pancreas, which was a rather unique BBS that served up a lot of textfiles back in the day. How could it be omitted?

voltagex_ 11y ago
If no one archived it, it's gone. If no one submitted it to an archive, it's hard to find. If someone saved it to a floppy disk, it's probably gone [1] [1]: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191
- empressplay 11y ago
  That article's a bit melodramatic -- I have Apple II floppies from the mid 1980s that still read fine. They just need to have been stored properly.
fizzacyst 11y ago
Wow! FpG mentioned on Hacker News. Whoda thunk? Unique is one way to describe it. I have an archive of some (sadly, not all) of our stuff, but after looking through it just now there's a lot that isn't exactly, um, appropriate? I guess the whole point was to be shocking but, if I'm honest, the tables have turned. A lot of it offends and embarrasses /me/ now. Older, wiser, less acid... Were you a regular?
- kw71 11y ago
  Lol! Less acid. I called frequently. I remember having a chat session with the sysop and was amazed that he could type rapidly in that funky mixed-case all the time. Maybe he had a foot pedal for a shift key?

chjj 11y ago

This is gold to my inner terminal nerd. I made a simple terminal ANSI art viewer just for this: https://github.com/chjj/blessed/tree/master/example/ansi-viewer https://github.com/chjj/blessed/tree/master/example/ansi-vie...

karmakaze 11y ago
Niice. Looks way better than `curl -si <url>`. Thanks!

donflamenco 11y ago

Brings back old memories of TheDraw in the DOS days. Made some ANSI art back for some pirate boards in the early 90s. Someone archived it and I was able to find one of the ones I did. http://imgur.com/tscJzzs http://imgur.com/tscJzzs If your interested in looking at amazing ones, look for Jed from the ACID group (or others?) His stuff was amazing. I wonder what he is doing now.

teamhappy 11y ago
Here they are: http://www.acid.org/ http://www.acid.org/ Also: http://www.chemical-reaction.org/ http://www.chemical-reaction.org/

sjs382 11y ago

Also, http://artpacks.org http://artpacks.org

lloyddobbler 11y ago
I was gonna say - textfiles.com has some good examples of 'what is ANSI art?', but to really get down into 'What's the big deal?', people need to see the iCE, ACiD, and RELiC packs from circa 1993-94. Glad someone's collected those.
kristopolous 11y ago
Why a native phone app? Isn't this a gallery of images? Am I missing something (other than just for the fun of it)?
aw3c2 11y ago
Does that site seriously have no scrollbar while scrolling one line at a time or is my browser broken?

grumblestumble 11y ago

I remember when I switched from TheDraw to the amazing new technology of RIPScript, which was like some insanely convoluted svg precursor, but allowed for some pretty metal vector graphix loading screens. http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/PROGRAMS/GRAPHICS/RIPSCRIPT/ http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/PROGRAMS/GRAPHICS/RIPS... Then about five years ago I started switching all my web development away from pngs and gifs to svgs. The more things change...

Flenser 11y ago

In the early days of the web I remember seeing an ASCII art pheonix made of (if I remember correctly) AGCT dna-like sequences. It rendered really slowly in netscape. I'd love to know how today's browsers handle it but alas it is lost in time...

dasil003 11y ago

Looking at some of those gave me a visceral impulse to play some door games.

jquast 11y ago

also http://textmod.es/ http://textmod.es/

waitingkuo 11y ago

Believe or not, telnet://ptt.cc , one of the bbs in Taiwan, is still highly active with more than 100k concurrent users normally.

vansonlin 11y ago
it's crazy, isn't it lol. (I am Taiwanese, who is actively using PTT

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

edmanet 11y ago

Brings me back to the days when I had a 300baud modem on my C-64 and tied up the phone line for hours at a time.