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
Comments:
So, how'd I do??? And thank you for your feedback. The ASCII art seems good as it stands, no?
"could not type a simple English sentence normally"
that is in part, because most people did not speak and write english as their first language. Okay, there were some people that did what you said, but those "L33T" guys were mostly the exact opposite of what they pretended to be.
"and identified their board as "World Head Quarters" "
WHQ or World Head Quarters,
European HQ, USHQ, German HQ, whatever country HQ, Courier HQ, "simply" HQ, Distro. , Member Board etc. were real labels. The big question was: xHQ of what? And there lied the difference between a cool BBS or a wannabe. I know that there was the strange urge among guys in the Commodore Amiga scene to belong to a group and simply found a new one, if nobody wanted you which was completely stupid but I guess it makes you look cooler if you say "Scavenger OF SuperCool" rather than just "Scavenger" hehe.
Anyhow, the difference between "Cool" HQ and "Lame" HQ was known by the people that knew what was going on and made the "Lame" HQ only something to impress your clueless buddies from school (which is for a lot of people reason enough actually hehe).
Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy of SAC hehe (among others e.g. TRSI PC, Razor 1911 etc.)
