
ANSI Art Collection from Old BBSs - FreakyT
http://artscene.textfiles.com/ansi/
======
donflamenco
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
Here they are: [http://www.acid.org/](http://www.acid.org/)

Also: [http://www.chemical-reaction.org/](http://www.chemical-reaction.org/)

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empire29
[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.

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shon
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.

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grumblestumble
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/RIPS...](http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/PROGRAMS/GRAPHICS/RIPSCRIPT/)

Then about five years ago I started switching all my web development away from
pngs and gifs to svgs. The more things change...

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chjj
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-
vie...](https://github.com/chjj/blessed/tree/master/example/ansi-viewer)

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

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

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

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acomjean
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
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
DesqView had DVANSI.COM IIRC

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sjs382
Also, [http://artpacks.org](http://artpacks.org)

~~~
lloyddobbler
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.

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Flenser
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...

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kw71
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?

~~~
fizzacyst
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
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?

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edmanet
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.

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dasil003
Looking at some of those gave me a visceral impulse to play some door games.

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jquast
also [http://textmod.es/](http://textmod.es/)

