Recycling ANSI Art: Tracing the Origins of BBS Logon Screens (breakintochat.com) 25
BBS-era "door" games are preserved by the site Break Into Chat, along with their history. Now the site's actually traced the origins of several ANSI art screens in the 1980s and "how different people later transformed the original images," starting from one of the most popular bulletin board systems in St. Louis, Missouri.
Slashdot reader Kirkman14 writes: "Fire Escape" was curator of the authoritative list of bulletin board systems in St. Louis's area code and sysop of the area's most popular board. Like many sysops of that time, Fire Escape enlivened her bulletin board by finding and repurposing older ANSI art. Eventually her BBS had 18 different logon screens in its rotation, many of which featured flames or mushroom clouds or made liberal use of red and yellow.
Break Into Chat follows the trail: Some, maybe even most, of Fire Escape's logon screens had actually been adapted from old school "public domain" ANSI art drawn in the late 1980s and early 1990s by folks such as Michael C. Ling, Lora Ruffner (aka "Ebony Eyes") and Violet Stymacks.... Stymacks was unusually generous with her ANSI art. When she first began drawing, she combed through Fidonet node lists looking for bulletin boards with interesting or inspiring names. When she found one, she would draw an ANSI screen that fit the board's theme, then send it to the sysop. Eventually, sysops began seeking her out, too. By late 1990, she claimed that 500 bulletin boards were using her screens. Three years later, that total had tripled, according to Boardwatch . I believe it — I have located more than 1,100 of her pieces so far. She was so prolific that it would be surprising if she hadn't reused or remixed her own work over the years...
[D]id they intend for other people to do so? Or would they have considered such borrowing or adapting as "ripping" or just plain "stealing"? These questions have dogged the BBS, ASCII art, and ANSI art scenes from the beginning. A freelance writer named Patrick Grote grappled with this ethical dilemma in 1990. He had begun to publish archives of ANSI art that he had collected from various public messageboards and networks. But what were people allowed to do with the ANSI screens in these collections? Was it okay to modify them? "Tough call," Grote said. "I know some people copyright their screens by inserting a little '(C)' on it," Grote wrote in a README file included in these collections. "Is this 'true' copyrighting? I would say yes, but then again, I don't feel like having any legal action taken against me for using an ANSI screen. In my opinion, I would say leave the ones that say '(C)' alone, but make every effort to contact the artist and ask for permission...."
When I corresponded with Fire Escape this year, she admitted her memory wasn't what it used to be, but felt certain that she had not asked any artists for permission because she didn't know who they were or how to reach them. "I figured if anyone had an issue, I'd just remove the screen," she said.
"But no one ever said anything about it."
Slashdot reader Kirkman14 writes: "Fire Escape" was curator of the authoritative list of bulletin board systems in St. Louis's area code and sysop of the area's most popular board. Like many sysops of that time, Fire Escape enlivened her bulletin board by finding and repurposing older ANSI art. Eventually her BBS had 18 different logon screens in its rotation, many of which featured flames or mushroom clouds or made liberal use of red and yellow.
Break Into Chat follows the trail: Some, maybe even most, of Fire Escape's logon screens had actually been adapted from old school "public domain" ANSI art drawn in the late 1980s and early 1990s by folks such as Michael C. Ling, Lora Ruffner (aka "Ebony Eyes") and Violet Stymacks.... Stymacks was unusually generous with her ANSI art. When she first began drawing, she combed through Fidonet node lists looking for bulletin boards with interesting or inspiring names. When she found one, she would draw an ANSI screen that fit the board's theme, then send it to the sysop. Eventually, sysops began seeking her out, too. By late 1990, she claimed that 500 bulletin boards were using her screens. Three years later, that total had tripled, according to Boardwatch . I believe it — I have located more than 1,100 of her pieces so far. She was so prolific that it would be surprising if she hadn't reused or remixed her own work over the years...
[D]id they intend for other people to do so? Or would they have considered such borrowing or adapting as "ripping" or just plain "stealing"? These questions have dogged the BBS, ASCII art, and ANSI art scenes from the beginning. A freelance writer named Patrick Grote grappled with this ethical dilemma in 1990. He had begun to publish archives of ANSI art that he had collected from various public messageboards and networks. But what were people allowed to do with the ANSI screens in these collections? Was it okay to modify them? "Tough call," Grote said. "I know some people copyright their screens by inserting a little '(C)' on it," Grote wrote in a README file included in these collections. "Is this 'true' copyrighting? I would say yes, but then again, I don't feel like having any legal action taken against me for using an ANSI screen. In my opinion, I would say leave the ones that say '(C)' alone, but make every effort to contact the artist and ask for permission...."
When I corresponded with Fire Escape this year, she admitted her memory wasn't what it used to be, but felt certain that she had not asked any artists for permission because she didn't know who they were or how to reach them. "I figured if anyone had an issue, I'd just remove the screen," she said.
"But no one ever said anything about it."
It was a different time (Score:5, Insightful)
People were more casual about it. It was far more important to be cool than to own things -at least in the online world.
You could use something someone else created -especially if you improved on it. Collections of things other people made were cool, in general. Just don't try to say it was your original creation or your idea first.
Don't be a dick. Reputation mattered, and communities were surprisingly small.
I lived this era (Score:4, Insightful)
Some of the ANSI art was so colorful and creative, I remember wishing I was able to draw it myself but I only had an Apple //e and that meant I had 14.4kbps and no ANSI editor. To make it worse I mostly saw them only in black and white (color at friends' houses) until that day my new $2400 PowerMac 8100 allowed me to log in with a terminal emulator that supported color.
Having seen that, well, it was a vastly different era overall. How much things have changed in 30 years!
Re:I lived this era (Score:4, Insightful)
Me too. Made an opening source door library and a couple of applications like ANSI colours supporting chat as an example of it, even started developing an open source BBS software, but at some point everyone moved to www, so that project was never finished.
Trial by Fire BBS (Score:5, Insightful)
A buddy and I ran the Trial by Fire BBS in northwest Ohio until late 1995. We had lots of ANSI art we used from other artists and some of it my own creation as well. I had an ANSI editor (for the life of me I can't remember the name of it) and made all of the menus and a few logon screens. Man those were fun times ... damn Internet, LOL. I'm pretty sure I still have the WildCat BBS installation diskettes in a box somewhere around here. As soon as dial-up ISPs starting showing up our daily usage count went damn near to zero overnight.
Re: Trial by Fire BBS (Score:5, Informative)
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Then that was probably the one.
I mostly skipped these (Score:5, Insightful)
I got my frst 1200 bps modem in 1988.
A full PC screen is 2000 characters, and an ANSI code to switch color or whatever is several bytes itself.
Lettng the BBS render that lovingly-crafted welcome screen took a significant fraction of a minute--and every minute was precious when Mom might want to use the phone at any time.
IIRC, a PCBoard BBS would let you skip it by enternig your name as "FIrstname Lastname y q" or Firstname Lastname n q", depending on whether or not you wanted color and other effects for the rest of the UI.
I don't remember if it asked for the password after that, or if you put the password after your last name.
Anyway, I mostly saw these screens only on my first visit or two to a new BBS.
Re: I mostly skipped these (Score:4, Funny)
I used to be such an asshole. I mean, I'm still an asshole. But I used to be one too.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Well-crafted ANSI art logos and welcome banners were a nice touch and gave each bulletin board system some distinct character when you called the system for the first time. But as you say, they were a nuisance which just slowed things down in day-to-day use. Any good BBS software package had a user preference or other method of skipping them at login if you were already a regular user.
Back in the day, there were lots of shoddy BBS packages, though, which forced the user to answer all kinds of inane (Y/n) qu
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In the PC era with 80 column screens, a full 80x24 screen (PC screens were 80x25 but the last line was almost always a status line and unusable) is just under 4000 bytes (3920 to be exact - 80x25 is 4000). It's why you needed 8K for full screen text 80x25 for characters and 80x25 for attributes (color - 4 bits, blink, underline, etc).
The biggest problem with ANSI art though was corruption - some line noise or an overflowing UART would instantly corrupt it especially at the fancier levels when people had 14.
Re:I mostly skipped these (Score:4)
Those fancier speed class modems (V.32 and up (9600 bps and up)) generally had V.42 (LAPM) error correction to prevent line noise from showing up, though. Even some V.22bis (2400 bps) modems had MNP4. (See List of ITU-T V-series recommendations [wikipedia.org] for the details.)
The ANSI X3.64 / ECMA-48 / ISO/IEC 6429 [wikipedia.org] escape sequences for video terminal control were first defined in 1979, well before the IBM PC was even introduced. Their wire presentation is quite verbose and does not have much in common with the IBM PC graphics card standards and their internal video RAM presentation of the text-mode character-cell attributes.
Re: (Score:2)
...meant to write "video terminal color control"... the escape sequences for cursor positioning, erasing the screen etc. are older and originate from the first edition of ECMA-48, published in 1976 and famously implemented by the DEC VT100 [wikipedia.org] in 1978.
Was better then (Score:2)
Writing doors in pascal and c was so much fun. 10/10.
Too bad slashdot doesn't allow posting examples! (Score:2)
Some of them are pretty clever.
Cripple smash (Score:1)
https://breakintochat.com/ [breakintochat.com]
Trade wars, red dragon, (S|B)RE,..etc.
One of the door games I sometimes got shit for even then from users was a hilarious game called cripple smash.
https://breakintochat.com/wiki... [breakintochat.com]
Good memories... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was active online in this era. starting with 300 baud on a C=64, then moving up to C=128, Amiga and finally PC with a 57.6k modem before moving to dual-ISDN and DSL during the shell account / early WWW era. In Silicon Valley we of course had a healthy BBS scene. The one I called the most maxed out at 32 lines and ran the MajorBBS software by GlactiComm. GalactiComm made a 'GalactiBox' ISA serial expansion unit that would allow you to stack 16 internal modems into it. (max 64 modems over four units) So the place I called had two of them. The phone company had a great time getting those lines into a residence in Monte Sereno...
The popular multiplayer games on that system were Quest for Magic (it came stock with the BBS) Legend of Kyrandia (both are multiplayer MUD/Zork-likes, the latter was made into a successful point and click game in the 90s by Westwood) and Infinity Complex, which had a mutable environment you could dig out and expand.
I also occasionally called Spies in the Wire, which was run by Andy Rubin, later the creator of the Android operating system. Andy was a student and hobbyist at the time.
This is all receding so far into the past now it feels very quaint. But it was cool to dial up and see some of this great ANSI art from time to time. I was always impressed with people who could look at that character set and make art of out it.
Trade Wars 2002 (Score:2)
Man I loved Trade Wars 2002. I played the heck out of that, with {COMMO} macros and a series of BBSes I'd call into every day to manage my empires. It now amuses me that it was set 24 years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
COMMO was the bomb. You could control almost every aspect of that program with custom macros. That era ended way too fast.
Re: Trade Wars 2002 (Score:1)
So much fun and good times with my high school friends on traders and those early door games. LORD was amusing too. I also remember one called something like Solar Realms Elite, does anyone remember that one?
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Re: Trade Wars 2002 (Score:1)
This is awesome! I love the trip down memory lane and will be exploring your excellent content, thank you! Really shows why a site like slashdot is so great, just folks helping each other out with fun stuff. Thatâ(TM)s the real Internet!
Re: (Score:2)
Trade Wars was a daily staple for me. I eventually got a GUI that could automate tasks like firing probes to map the universe, exploiting profitable trading pairs, and... I don't remember what else it could do, lol.
That game was definitely an inspiration for many that came after. It wouldn't surprise me if EVE devs played TW back in the day.
PC-lamerit - A story set in the dying days of BBSs (Score:4, Informative)
If anyone's interested in a fictional cartoon of some kids in rural Finland dealing with the transition from BBSs to the Web (as well as the Demoscene and the challenges of growing up), you can watch this epic animated series that's set in the time-period 1994..1997 - PC-lamerit [viznut.fi]. It covers many of the upheavals in the computer-scene going on at the time, and the attention to detail is amazing.
There are both Finnish (original) and English versions.
ANSI, ASCII, DEC VT-100 etc. (Score:1)
ANSI Standard X.364-1979 was published July 18th of that year. It includes control sequences and characters outside the ASCII standard.
https://vt100.net/annarbor/aaa... [vt100.net]
The first implementation was the DEC VT 100 in August 1978 (implementing the concepts before the standard was approved or homologated.)
The VT100 was limited by RAM to 24 80-column rows or 14 132-column rows. To get 24 132-column rows you had to get the VT 102.
DEC made a lot of revolutionary hardware, like the DECtalk unit, which gave Stephe