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.
Some of the art from the ANSI section was quite tricky to render. I used Linux's "screen" program in a console, or tetraview, or occasionally EMACS! Several times I had to size it to exactly 80 characters wide or the picture wouldn't display correctly. It was a puzzle figuring out the correct character encoding to use - who knows what dialect of characters the host's computer spoke? Best results so far have been with an old vga font I stumbled upon. I have to use something that looks like it kind of makes sense and hope for the best. In the case of the long banners, I had to render them a screenful at a time and paste them together end to end in the image. The result may well be the first time these long banner works have been seen whole on a single screen - perhaps even by the artists?
Hope you've all enjoyed this little tour. This is less than 10% of the banner ads in the archive, but these represent a good cross-sampling, with a bias towards work that IMHO especially deserved rendering.
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:
hey
nice to meet ya..
cheers,
TDS
Im really shocked as i new Yr nik name is TDS...
In all my TM and University students + teachers call me TDS. tHe d4Rk 5IDe....
Wow i thought im uniqe, ba im rong there is another one.