
The Art of Warez [video] - fcambus
https://vimeo.com/341663153
======
cronix
This was my preteens/teens. What a rush that was! Seeing all of those
groups/logos and I was on half those sites, and the transition from BBS's to
the dawn of the internet, or at least when it started to be used by the
public. My fav BBS was Fear and Loathing (in Las Vegas). It had a ton of LD
lines to connect to, which was important since it could take many hours to DL
a single game as they grew in size/spanning multiple disks, so the lines were
full a lot. I learned a lot of area codes lol, as you could usually tell which
BBS's were good ones based on the city they were in on the BBS lists. So many
hours spent tweaking connection string parameters on the good ol US Robotics
to make it dial faster, pause less in between tones, etc., so you could try to
connect to a board faster. It was almost like you were hacking the BBS just to
connect to it (redialing over and over lol). There wasn't even caller ID back
then, so they couldn't prevent you from hammering them. It was like a lottery
system whether you connected or not, as hundreds of others were doing the
exact same thing at the same time 24/7\. Oh, and you had to dedicate a lot of
your phone line time to hacking LD codes so you could spend the rest of the
time phreaking so you could actually connect/download without paying LD
charges. It took a dedicated phone line. It was always fun when someone else
in the house picked up the phone and ruined your download. Thank goodness when
the z-modem protocol came out with resume functionality. Way better than
y-modem or whatever it was before it. lol ;)

~~~
ngold
That is a whole mountain of nostalgia, especially the phone line. I remember
what a big deal *69 and party lines were when they became available. I
actually got in a bit of trouble from Prodigy for calling new kids on the
block gay.

------
uptown
What a fun watch. I was a member of CiA, the “Creators of intense Art” and my
handle at the time shows up in the video. I wasn’t an ANSI artist though —
mostly worked on VGAs using Photoshop and 3D Studio R4 on my 386DX with the
math coprocessor. Rendering frames was painfully slow, but there was a big
push each month to pull together a collection of ANSI, VGA, RIP, and Lit to
release and highlight our skills.

I’m still in touch with a few of the guys I knew from the group. Most were
people I’d never met in person —- only spoke to on phone bridges or on IRC.

Such a fun and formative time where everything was still so new and
unexplored.

One of the more interesting things to come out of the ANSI scene, as the web
began to emerge, was a website called tiles.ice.org which gave each artist
just the edge pixels of a square of artwork from what another artist had
created. From there, the artist on the receiving end, could create their own
square of the overall composition. Only when all of the squares had been
created could you see the end product with the combined imagery created from
the imaginations of artists who expanded upon the edge pixels from another
artist.

Thanks for posting this. I remember those days very fondly.

~~~
rashkov
I think this could be the tiles, if anyone else is curious:
[http://www.ice.org/tiles/](http://www.ice.org/tiles/) Super cool project!
Would be fun to have a modern equivalent.

~~~
uptown
Yeah, that was it. There's also a collection of many artpacks here:

[https://artpacks.org/](https://artpacks.org/)

------
nickjj
I still remember getting an $1,800 phone bill when I was 16 because the state
I lived in split 2 counties into separate area codes and my ISP had a number I
used to use labeled as local even though it was now long distance.

My mom was pissed but luckily we got the phone company to drop the charge due
to all of the confusion.

This was shortly after the BBS era when dial-up ISPs started to pop up
everywhere. Earthlink, Mindspring, NetZero, etc.. It was nice having a lot of
competition back then. There was one ISP in NY called Red (or Red something).
I remember it gave the best ping times in Quake. Does anyone remember what
that ISP was named? It was during the late 1990s or maybe very early 2000s.

~~~
rhacker
Anyone remember that period where FREE dialup was everywhere - even freaking
KMart had one- little ad appeared at the top of the screen.

Here it is:
[https://archive.org/details/bluelight_201711](https://archive.org/details/bluelight_201711)

~~~
tomduncalf
Ahh yes, in the UK there was one called X-stream (and another called ic24) for
a while which did exactly the same thing with an ad banner in exchange for a
toll-free number. I think it was only free at weekends, and you’d have to
retry hundreds of times to get through once word got out, only to end up with
a crappy connection so slow you could barely use it. Still, it was free!

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Stream_Network](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Stream_Network)

~~~
jamespo
Someone I knew wrote a little program that killed the ad window...

------
surfsvammel
Oh my. This brings me back to my teens. Spending all days on Swapper BBS (they
had all the best warez), downloading Top Gun over a week. Me and my friend
alternated disks (it was zipped into 14 1.4MB chunks) then trading floppy
disks at school. The joy when we, after a week, had the whole game.

My mom used to kill me over hogging the phone-line all day and night. And the
phone bills where Out of this world (pun intended).

Brings tears to my eyes. One of the happiest periods of my life.

~~~
ttul
I remember when my friend - who ran a popular warez BBS in my area - finally
got his 14.4kbps USRobotics Sportster modem. I literally sprinted to his house
for a demo, watching the warez download 6x faster than the 2400bps we were
used to. It was so exciting.

Kids these days have no idea..

~~~
tonyarkles
Heh, I had a 33k6 and my buddy across (an admittedly small) town only had a
14k4. It was often faster for him to ask me to download something, and then
he’d hop on his bike, ride to my place, grab the floppy, and ride home.

That, and FidoNet! Nothing like a 12-year-old arguing his _clearly superior_
opinions on a high latency global message board!

Fond fond memories.

Edit: also got my first functional Linux distro over dialup (Slackware).
Floppies were expensive too, so I somehow figured out that I could download
the A packages (core system), and a small subset of the N packages
(networking) to floppies, and then bootstrap my way from there. Basically just
grabbed PPP, the command-line FTP client, and Lynx, did the install, and then
downloaded the X11 packages and Netscape from there.

~~~
surfsvammel
Nice. Suse Linux was my first. But that came. Couple of years later. CD-ROM
was already a thing by then.

Regarding the modems. My internal PCI 36.6 modem actually got me shorter
latencies than using a 50k modem over serial bus. I have no idea why. But my
50k modem was at the very last years of modems. Many where getting ISDN and
cable by then.

~~~
paulannesley
Perhaps, like me, your serial port was driven by an older UART chip like an
8250 [0] which could be a bottleneck for modems faster than 9,600 baud.

I remember in teen years phoning the local computer shop every week asking if
they had the 16550 UART [1] serial cards in stock yet to upgrade my 486DX4-100
to get full 28.8kbps from my modem. Can't remember if they ever did.

I think the 16550 was faster largely because it had a larger buffer, so it
wouldn't wait or drop data as often when the CPU was slow/busy.

[0]:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/8250_UART](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/8250_UART)

[1]:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/16550_UART](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/16550_UART)

------
nickstinemates
Having the fortune of growing up at the exact moment all of this was happening
has formed and shaped who I am today. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

------
myth_drannon
Even from your browser you can still connect to the official ACiD BBS
[http://piranha.zapto.org/](http://piranha.zapto.org/).

I recently posted a link to an interview with the creator of "Tradewars 2002"
\- a BBS door game. A bit different niche from the same era.
[https://breakintochat.com/blog/2019/07/19/gary-martin-
creato...](https://breakintochat.com/blog/2019/07/19/gary-martin-creator-
tradewars-2002/)

------
turtlebits
This is more about ANSI BBS art than it is about warez - which was usually
contained ASCII art for releases.

~~~
VectorLock
ANSI art and Warez were pretty closely tied scenes.

------
doc_gunthrop
Great video, though the team Razor 1911 really deserve more coverage. They
were the prolific game crackers of their day.

~~~
rjbwork
Indeed. I haven't been into the warez scene in a long time. But if you look at
any pre-db, Razor 1911 is still prolific. The thing that astounds me is that
there are still so many groups, topsites, categories, etc. in this age of near
ubiquitous surveillance.

For 10 bux a month you can get good quality music from nearly all artists on
spotify. For 5 more, so can your whole household. Steam, and the steep
discounts offered to the patient, has made PC gaming quite a cheap hobby (once
you've bought the hardware, anyway). Yet, these people are still releasing
games, music, apps, etc.

Just a lot of dedication to keep the scene going that long.

~~~
ddtaylor
Some of "the scene" actually do it for archival reasons and aren't very big on
piracy itself. Cracks are about preserving games playable long after their
makers go out of business. The same goes for private servers.

------
allenu
BBSes were central to my growth as a software developer. I was a teenager in
the '90s and quickly became hooked on calling up BBSes.

I played the games on them and found out you could make money writing and
selling them... so I made my own. I released them as shareware, as others
before me had, and asked people to mail me checks to register them (i.e.
remove ad screens). I soon got mail from people all over North America and the
world asking for registration codes.

I wrote those games in C and C++ and were the first big projects I ever worked
on. Looking back, the code was really poorly done, but it taught me a lot
about managing work and basic programming fundamentals. I got better as a
developer over time, but I cut my teeth on writing BBS games.

------
things
Brings back great memories of long nights spent making ansi screens in
TheDraw. I still have the muscle memory for all the keyboard shortcuts (it
seems weird nowadays to imagine drawing with the keyboard).

I was even a minor member of iCE for a while. My first experience of impostor
syndrome :)

~~~
christianvozar
There are still artists making great ansi art today. You don’t even need to
draw with the keyboard if you don’t want with new editors like Moebius.
[http://www.andyh.org/moebius/](http://www.andyh.org/moebius/)

Give it a whirl, you’d be surprised how your fingers remember how to mash the
function keys to shade!

What was your handle in iCE?

------
gfodor
BBSes were great, and we got another burst of this kind of artistic and
creative culture during the early days of the web. I hope it happens again
somehow.

(ex-CiA coder :))

~~~
klez
At this point I'm curious: do you know the guy who commented this
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20598122](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20598122)
and did you know he was an artist for CiA before he commented or was this one
of those "surprise!" moment for you guys?

EDIT: spelling

------
pishpash
No mention of mods, the audio counterpart to the visual side?

[https://modarchive.org/](https://modarchive.org/)

------
kaivi
Also this really short documentary on warez [1] is gold. [1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAQqrnX7BsM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAQqrnX7BsM)

~~~
ganoushoreilly
Pre money Kevin Rose's neighbor.. these were great.

------
AdrianB1
I hosted a BBS in the mid 90's and it was a pain until OS/2 Warp and the 5th
MB of RAM on a 486/66 that allowed me to run the BBS while still using my
computer. Most of the traffic was photos of places abroad or girls. Every
Christmas I left it without any ratio, the utilization was almost 100%.

------
mettamage
So I didn't fully get it: what is BBS?

~~~
tptacek
It's like Reddit except lots of unrelated people ran it and you dialed into it
with a modem.

~~~
slantyyz
And the number of concurrent users was directly correlated to the number of
phone lines there were for the BBS.

So there were a lot of indie BBSes that scaled to... 1 concurrent user.

~~~
tptacek
But that was OK! Because BBS's worked like Usenet. You logged in, checked your
messages, and logged out. A lot of multi-line BBS's had lines dedicated to
downloads and lines dedicated to interactive use.

I am having a weird time-travel moment remembering Telix continuously trying
to redial through busy signals to BBS's to play my next turn on some door game
while I listened to Smiths songs on FM radio and soldered crystals into Radio
Shack touchpads so I could get free calls from pay phones.

Let's see how many of _those_ concepts the median HN user remembers. :)

~~~
kikoreis
Telix but not Telemate? ISTR the scripting language for Telemate was really
nice and I definitely built something pretty sophisticated for x25 NUA
scanning.

Payphone hacking was not much of a thing in Brazil but I spent days on
Bluebeep on international R2 connections. It is amazing to think how hard you
had to work to be able to call abroad. The scarcity in everything made for a
lot of fun.

Toneloc was also something I recall from the era that was outstanding. It is a
pity I never printed out the full exchange scans I had, as they were
beautiful.

------
christianvozar
The ansi scene is alive and well today. Several groups such as Blocktronics
and Fuel continue to put out packs. You can view the work by some of your old
favorites still kicking it old school on the archive:
[https://16colo.rs/](https://16colo.rs/)

------
tptacek
This has been going around Facebook for a couple days now. It takes me back! I
was an "artist"† in one of the better-known second-tier groups (if ICE and
ACID comprise the first tier) and ran a fairly popular, though relatively
small-scale, BBS in Chicago.

It's a good video and worth watching, but (I think) gets some things wrong
that kept snapping me out of it.

For one thing, the link between HPAV boards ("HPAC" was not a common term) and
warez boards is way overblown. The major groups all probably did have a couple
of H/P people attached in some way, but for the most part I think all that
amounted to was setting up conference bridges, which was super easy to do. The
bit about "dummy 1-800 numbers" \--- and someone could tell me that did really
happen in a bunch of places --- rings false, because at the time, 800 numbers
were perceived as risky, due to ANI. I got in trouble for phone bills like
everyone else, but really, unless you were actually downloading warez, dialing
into random BBS's across North America wasn't _that_ expensive.

Warez boards and H/P boards were very different subcultures.

(For that matter: many boards _were_ linked together through the FIDO
protocols, which was like the BBS equivalent of Usenet).

I also don't remember much of a crossover between the ANSI scene and the
demoscene (they were both linked through the broader BBS scene, of course). I
don't think it's the case that ANSI people fed into demo stuff.

There are technical details in here I think are wrong as well. Most notably, I
don't think it was modem speeds that broke ANSI, but rather modern operating
systems. We didn't use ANSI because it was space efficient so much as because
the only way to access a BBS was through a terminal emulator, and, for a long
time, that meant MS-DOS. Also: the amount of technical skill you needed to do
this stuff is way overblown. MS-DOS is cryptic compared to macOS and Win10,
but it's how _everything_ got done in the late 1980s and early 1990s; your
parents often knew as much as you did about getting around on MS-DOS. Once
people started SLIP'ing into ISPs on Windows and OS/2, it was just as easy to
get GIFs as it was to get ANSI art.

It's hard to blame the video for that; my understanding is that it started out
as a school final project, and, at any rate, it's trying to communicate to a
lay audience.

Finally: I'm sort of spitting my drink out at the assertion that ANSI artists
were exploring undiscovered new modes of visual expression, or that ANSI
shading techniques are comparable to major artistic movements. If you want to
say that about any countercultural art form, you'd say it about real graffiti,
from which ANSI derived a lot of its visual style. The artistic-technical work
involved in graffiti is, I think, a lot more serious than ANSI was. Looking
back at old ANSI packs, a lot of it is just the technical-technical work of
transcribing a reference image from a comic book or album cover into a pixel
editor. That, by the way, didn't take weeks or months; once you got the hang
of it, it was pretty quick (and by the early 1990s, a lot of that artwork was
being drawn specifically for and with high-res viewers, so literally you were
just using TheDraw as a sort of zoomed-in pixel editor).

I think pixel artists today work with much more significant constraints, do
more interesting work, and probably don't draw a whole lot on the 1990s ANSI
scene.

Eagerly awaiting my comeuppance from an ICE or ACID person on this critique.
:)

† _not a good one_

~~~
EvanAnderson
So many QWK packets!

I loved the BBS and "underground" scene. I really wish I'd been able to keep
in contact w/ the odd acquaintences and friends I had back then. It all didn't
seem so fleeting in the moment. Connecting people to old handles from 25+
years ago isn't easy (which, I suppose, is good for a lot of people too).

~~~
bdreadz
Think about this at times. How many people I even met at meetups or even knew
early early days of Defcon. The underground bbs scene and then the underground
irc channels. Oh well.

------
bdreadz
Hardcore trip down memory lane. Went to high school with lord jazz (ACiD) and
all my bbs ansi was done by him. Had loads of fun back in those days running
my board. Tons of cool user meetups. Love seeing videos and art expos that
display this work.

~~~
christianvozar
That’s amazing! Did LD! Release the art for your bbs in a pack? Do you still
happen to have the art somewhere? Would love to get it hosted on the archive
if possible. [https://16colo.rs/](https://16colo.rs/)

~~~
bdreadz
I wish I still had it. My favorite version he did was the Maxx. I think it was
a little before he joined ACiD.

~~~
christianvozar
Well if you come across it the ansi scene as a whole would consider that some
found gold. I would even donate to a Patreon to fund finding it or restoring
it from a floppy.

------
dingu
It's visually a nice collection. As a documentary it is pretty inaccurate in a
number of key areas. The BBS Documentary has a very nice and accurate
treatment (interviews with actual people from the scene) if one is interested.

------
platz
[http://16colo.rs](http://16colo.rs)

------
ninjakeyboard
Makes me feel old because I remember that world. I lived in DOS. I remember
trying to download Doom2 over telephone. All 32mb of it zipped - it took
hours. Then we'd play 'networked' over phone.

------
tobiasbischoff
Uh, my teen years in one video. I was more on the warez side though. In Europe
the Warez BBS had a "secret" couriering network that was out of band.
Everymonth one of the biggest BBS would distribute all its uploads on DAT Tape
(4/8 Gigs a Tape) to smaller ones. I was the one who received and distributed
these tapes to local BBSs.. fun times.

------
unixhero
He covered the first phase of the art scene. Great. But what about the art
scene for FTP sites of 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, and in addition the art scene
for .nfo files and the artists who created them.

And it would also be interesting to cover the art scene around cracktros which
spawned the demo scene, and to this date still exist in its same form as in
the 1980s.

~~~
unixhero
Ah. For instance SaC has the entire history on their public(!) website:
[http://www.roysac.com/sac.html](http://www.roysac.com/sac.html) Well worth a
visit

------
walrus01
+++ATH0

~~~
Annatar
NO CARRIER

------
blondin
guys, warez wasn't just for the BBS generation. i knew and learned about warez
through IRC. i think of myself as the IRC/ICQ/AIM generation and i tried BBS
be could not figure it out. but this makes me feel nostalgic too :)

------
dusing
I'll never forget running a BBS with my friends when I was in 5th grade. We
had 4 lines the chat, and games were so much fun. Also ran a warez website
(lame one) but taught me photoshop and html at the time.

Formative stuff that is for sure.

------
synack
Minecraft is the new ANSI art.

------
unixhero
SaC - Superior Art Creations. I guess they're still around?

------
DEADBEEFC0FFEE
I wish I could have the ANSI logos I made for my group. Such intense and
exciting times. It was truely the edge of things at the time.

~~~
christianvozar
Have you check the archive to see if they were released and captured?
[https://16colo.rs/](https://16colo.rs/)

------
na85
Anyone know the title of the chiptune playing at the 14:00 mark?

I've heard it somewhere but can't remember. It's driving me nuts.

------
Dowwie
I've seen comments on HN by members of ACiD. Maybe they will make an
appearance again?

~~~
christianvozar
Blocktronics.org Some former acid still release in this group. You can find us
around on discord or FB.

------
sneakware
This is so good, thank you

------
overcast
ahhhh nostalgia, brings me back to my courier days in college. Getting access
to a "pre" was so addicting. Great documentary!

