A rainy Friday evening's entertainment may be had by downloading the BBS section tarball from textfiles.com. I found myself engrossed in the ASCII and ANSI art banners from these bulletin boards of yore. I decided to render some of them and make screenshots to post here, both in the interest of further preserving this bit of history, and to offer a highlight tour to those who lack the patience and resources to view them directly. Click on any thumbnail to see the fullsize image.

Much can be told about this culture from the ads. Such as, that apparently as many places were hawking pirated software in the 80s as are pushing Viagra and porn today. And absolutely *everybody* who offered "warez" had the fastest system, the biggest archive of files, could not type a simple English sentence normally, and identified their board as "World Head Quarters" - this last so common that it is many times abbreviated to "WHQ".

The whole ANSI-Art tour:
Can I play too?
Part 8
Part 7
Part 6
Part 5
Part 4
Part 3
Part 2
Part 1