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But ansi is very 90s! http://www.acid.org/100/lorez.html

How about getting some nice prints of some of the stuff from ACiD? I love that old-school ascii art...

Or you could print Natalie Portman and hot grits on a dot matrix printer...or goatse.. It's up to you..

I miss the days of the BBS era also. Anyone remember forum hacks, like VisionX? If anyone is interested, below is a coupled of good links.

Remember ACiD and iCE ANSI groups? http://www.acid.org/ http://www.ice.org/index.php?display=pack&packID=1 99207

I am not trying to promote or anything, but I got a great movie called BBS: The Documentary. It is a great 4 disc set documenting the history of the BBS scene. Their link is below. http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/

The ANSI scene was HUGE. ACID, CIA, i could go on. Wonder where people like Trident(CIA?) and Beastie(ACID) are these days... Trident ran Muerte, Beastie ran Channel Zer0 out of Texas.

Actually, Channel Zer0 BBS was the ACiD western headquarters and operated out of Orange County, California. Beastie is now an executive at major storage and digital imaging corporation. I cannot personally speak for Trident, but Napalm, the last person to lead CIA, is a graphics designer for a large cable television network and creates his own tshirts and toys under the brand names Dead Zebra and Creatures in my Head.

I'm Senior Staff of iCE.

Sad to say, ACiDreleased their Last Pack Ever a few months back, leaving iCE to be one of the last remaining 'old school' groups.

While we still have a lot of inactive members, our current crew still put out fantastic art, every single month.

I head up the iCE photography Division, releasing photos of an iCE-standard.

As you can see from the posts here, lots of iCE members are /. readers, and big in the geek world.

Slothy (Senior Staff) works in the gaming section, farmy being big in the open source / security niches, plus countless others.

Of interest is SketchCow, and his BBS documentary, which features interviews of old iCE members, and other members from the scene.

I'm Senior Staff of iCE.

Sad to say, ACiDreleased their Last Pack Ever a few months back, leaving iCE to be one of the last remaining 'old school' groups.

While we still have a lot of inactive members, our current crew still put out fantastic art, every single month.

I head up the iCE photography Division, releasing photos of an iCE-standard.

As you can see from the posts here, lots of iCE members are /. readers, and big in the geek world.

Slothy (Senior Staff) works in the gaming section, farmy being big in the open source / security niches, plus countless others.

Of interest is SketchCow, and his BBS documentary, which features interviews of old iCE members, and other members from the scene.

The ARTS

BinRev

Default Radio

Radio FreeK America

The primary organizer of this demoparty, Legalize, gave a very elaborate speech on why exactly Utah (more specifically Salt Lake City) is the birthplace of modern computer graphics.

Yes, there will be. Your article is officially overdue. :-)

d00d! ACiD is teh ma1n j4n3 slic3r!!!

There are a great number of interesting underground talk radio shows which have sprung up as of late, many of which deal with network security, computer programming, software piracy, individual privacy issues, etc.

I recommend the following shows:

The ARTS: Artscene Radio Talk Show - show archive
BinRev: Binary Revolution - show archive
RFA: Radio Freek America - show archive

and of course we can't forget Emmanuel Goldstein's Off the Hook which has shows dating back to 1988:
2600's Off the Hook - show archive

TEXTFILES.COM also stores a huge library of other radio shows and rants at its newly branded AUDIO.TEXTFILES.COM.

ACiD-100. The 100th Acquisition Update. The Final Artpack.

At the start of this year, ACiD announced the release of their 100th and final artpack, ACiD-100. This may ring a small bell for some of you, and no bell at all for others; however, to refresh, from 1990 to 1997, ACiD was the household name for all your ANSI art / ascii art / high-resolution artwork needs, especially toward the promotion of private bulletin boards systems (BBSes).

Of course, with the advent of GUI operating environments and ubiquitous affordable Internet access (+ their contingent collapses of local dialup textmode culture) the text art that was once their bread and butter fell by the wayside, last released in 1997. However, as a commemorative gesture, a bevy of new material in the medium by original ANSI masters manifests in this ultimate release. Weighing in at a hefty 454MB, it also features a wide selection of music in the MP3 and Impulse Tracker module formats from their musical subsidiary, the pHluid Music Group. Also featured are last versions of their four most popular software titles for DOS and Windows, complete with never before seen full source code released under the GNU GPL.

Several highspeed servers are available for your pick of file transfer via BitTorrent, FTP or HTTP. If you wish to mirror please contact Anthem on EFNET IRC in #ACiD or simply leave your Torrent client open and continue to help seed.

Thanks to everyone who stayed up late with me on IRC while I got the servers running and a very special thanks to the one who made all of this possible from 1990 - 2004 and taken the art scene to the next level, RaD Man.

-- Anthem and Cthulu

Torrent Clients
BitTorrent is a P2P sharing method and is the preferred means of obtaining ACiD-100. You may download BitTorrent 3.3 here.
Broadband users should experience rates of about 300-450kb/s due to our highspeed seeds. After installing BT, simply click on the file below to begin downloading.

Download ACiD-100
acid-100.zip - Preferred method, requires a Torrent client

acid-100.zip - HTTP mirror (.us, 1gbit, high24[7/ hoa)
acid-100.zip - FTP mirror (.us, 100mbit, djquad/ acid)
acid-100.rar - FTP mirror (.nl, 1gbit, redhound/ scene)
acid-100.rar - FTP mirror (.de, 100mbit, ferrex/ sac)

Tracker Stats - BitTorrent Tracker download statistics
ACiD Radio - Streaming ACiD-100 and pHluid music!

...

In related news, ACiD is selling DVD-ROMs for $13 USD containing the entirety of the Artpacks Archive they maintained -- in short, redundancy-checked, corruption-checked mirrors of all remaining / existing ANSI and artscene release activity, from artpacks to loaders and cracktros to e-mags. All that, and I hear they include an interface permitting the effortless access of these archaic visual formats on contemporary platforms -- so if you ever again wanted to see a lost JED ANSImation display at 2400 baud, here's your chance. For more information, please consult www.darkdomain.org. A descriptive list of the 4.2GB worth of files included on their DVD is also available at http://www.darkdomain.org/allfiles.zip.

ACiD-100. The 100th Acquisition Update. The Final Artpack.

At the start of this year, ACiD announced the release of their 100th and final artpack, ACiD-100. This may ring a small bell for some of you, and no bell at all for others; however, to refresh, from 1990 to 1997, ACiD was the household name for all your ANSI art / ascii art / high-resolution artwork needs, especially toward the promotion of private bulletin boards systems (BBSes).

Of course, with the advent of GUI operating environments and ubiquitous affordable Internet access (+ their contingent collapses of local dialup textmode culture) the text art that was once their bread and butter fell by the wayside, last released in 1997. However, as a commemorative gesture, a bevy of new material in the medium by original ANSI masters manifests in this ultimate release. Weighing in at a hefty 454MB, it also features a wide selection of music in the MP3 and Impulse Tracker module formats from their musical subsidiary, the pHluid Music Group. Also featured are last versions of their four most popular software titles for DOS and Windows, complete with never before seen full source code released under the GNU GPL.

Several highspeed servers are available for your pick of file transfer via BitTorrent, FTP or HTTP. If you wish to mirror please contact Anthem on EFNET IRC in #ACiD or simply leave your Torrent client open and continue to help seed.

Thanks to everyone who stayed up late with me on IRC while I got the servers running and a very special thanks to the one who made all of this possible from 1990 - 2004 and taken the art scene to the next level, RaD Man.

-- Anthem and Cthulu

Torrent Clients
BitTorrent is a P2P sharing method and is the preferred means of obtaining ACiD-100. You may download BitTorrent 3.3 here.
Broadband users should experience rates of about 300-450kb/s due to our highspeed seeds. After installing BT, simply click on the file below to begin downloading.

Download ACiD-100
acid-100.zip - Preferred method, requires a Torrent client

acid-100.zip - HTTP mirror (.us, 1gbit, high24[7/ hoa)
acid-100.zip - FTP mirror (.us, 100mbit, djquad/ acid)
acid-100.rar - FTP mirror (.nl, 1gbit, redhound/ scene)
acid-100.rar - FTP mirror (.de, 100mbit, ferrex/ sac)

Tracker Stats - BitTorrent Tracker download statistics
ACiD Radio - Streaming ACiD-100 and pHluid music!

...

In related news, ACiD is selling DVD-ROMs for $13 USD containing the entirety of the Artpacks Archive they maintained -- in short, redundancy-checked, corruption-checked mirrors of all remaining / existing ANSI and artscene release activity, from artpacks to loaders and cracktros to e-mags. All that, and I hear they include an interface permitting the effortless access of these archaic visual formats on contemporary platforms -- so if you ever again wanted to see a lost JED ANSImation display at 2400 baud, here's your chance. For more information, please consult www.darkdomain.org. A descriptive list of the 4.2GB worth of files included on their DVD is also available at http://www.darkdomain.org/allfiles.zip.

ACiD-100. The 100th Acquisition Update. The Final Artpack.

At the start of this year, ACiD announced the release of their 100th and final artpack, ACiD-100. This may ring a small bell for some of you, and no bell at all for others; however, to refresh, from 1990 to 1997, ACiD was the household name for all your ANSI art / ascii art / high-resolution artwork needs, especially toward the promotion of private bulletin boards systems (BBSes).

Of course, with the advent of GUI operating environments and ubiquitous affordable Internet access (+ their contingent collapses of local dialup textmode culture) the text art that was once their bread and butter fell by the wayside, last released in 1997. However, as a commemorative gesture, a bevy of new material in the medium by original ANSI masters manifests in this ultimate release. Weighing in at a hefty 454MB, it also features a wide selection of music in the MP3 and Impulse Tracker module formats from their musical subsidiary, the pHluid Music Group. Also featured are last versions of their four most popular software titles for DOS and Windows, complete with never before seen full source code released under the GNU GPL.

Several highspeed servers are available for your pick of file transfer via BitTorrent, FTP or HTTP. If you wish to mirror please contact Anthem on EFNET IRC in #ACiD or simply leave your Torrent client open and continue to help seed.

Thanks to everyone who stayed up late with me on IRC while I got the servers running and a very special thanks to the one who made all of this possible from 1990 - 2004 and taken the art scene to the next level, RaD Man.

-- Anthem and Cthulu

Torrent Clients
BitTorrent is a P2P sharing method and is the preferred means of obtaining ACiD-100. You may download BitTorrent 3.3 here.
Broadband users should experience rates of about 300-450kb/s due to our highspeed seeds. After installing BT, simply click on the file below to begin downloading.

Download ACiD-100
acid-100.zip - Preferred method, requires a Torrent client

acid-100.zip - HTTP mirror (.us, 1gbit, high24[7/ hoa)
acid-100.zip - FTP mirror (.us, 100mbit, djquad/ acid)
acid-100.rar - FTP mirror (.nl, 1gbit, redhound/ scene)
acid-100.rar - FTP mirror (.de, 100mbit, ferrex/ sac)

Tracker Stats - BitTorrent Tracker download statistics
ACiD Radio - Streaming ACiD-100 and pHluid music!

...

In related news, ACiD is selling DVD-ROMs for $13 USD containing the entirety of the Artpacks Archive they maintained -- in short, redundancy-checked, corruption-checked mirrors of all remaining / existing ANSI and artscene release activity, from artpacks to loaders and cracktros to e-mags. All that, and I hear they include an interface permitting the effortless access of these archaic visual formats on contemporary platforms -- so if you ever again wanted to see a lost JED ANSImation display at 2400 baud, here's your chance. For more information, please consult www.darkdomain.org. A descriptive list of the 4.2GB worth of files included on their DVD is also available at http://www.darkdomain.org/allfiles.zip.

Radman is a washed up little kid. He doesn't dominate anything. He doesnt draw anymore.

Oh, really?
BitchX logo by radman
ACiD logo by radman

Radman is a washed up little kid. He doesn't dominate anything. He doesnt draw anymore.

Oh, really?
BitchX logo by radman
ACiD logo by radman

The art thing is good and fine.. but what about her. She's a chick. That's better than art!

Idle Dreams is an excellent database which lets you search through almost a decade and a half of textmode and BBS artwork, including ANSI, ASCII, and even Telegrafix RIPscrip imagery. The great thing about it is you can sift through thousands of thumbnails and view the image directly from your browser.

For those who prefer to view their ASCII art files locally (shamless plug), ACiD is now distributing a Windows version of it's viewer appropriately titled ACiD View 6.10 for Windows.

Other great places to find hordes of ASCII are of course ftp.mimic.ca, ftp.artpacks.acid.org, and www.thuglife.org.

Idle Dreams is an excellent database which lets you search through almost a decade and a half of textmode and BBS artwork, including ANSI, ASCII, and even Telegrafix RIPscrip imagery. The great thing about it is you can sift through thousands of thumbnails and view the image directly from your browser.

For those who prefer to view their ASCII art files locally (shamless plug), ACiD is now distributing a Windows version of it's viewer appropriately titled ACiD View 6.10 for Windows.

Other great places to find hordes of ASCII are of course ftp.mimic.ca, ftp.artpacks.acid.org, and www.thuglife.org.

artpacks.acid.org says hi. Way to re-invent the wheel.

Here are some additional ASCII art sites worth visiting, some of which host artwork dating back to the early 1970's...

The Textfiles.com Computer Art Collection
Features a wide range of computer-oriented text-based artwork beginning with teletype (RTTY) art which predates ASCII. An archive of archives.
http://artscene.textfiles.com/

The ACiD Artpacks Archive
Indexed and sorted by year. Hosts a collection of over 13 years of ASCII, ANSI, RIPscrip and other digital artwork.
ftp://artpacks.acid.org/pub/artpacks/

The Christ ASCII Archives
Indexed and sorted by artgroup. The authoritative archive of IBM-PC and Amiga ASCII art.
ftp://ftp.mimic.ca/pub/ascii/

Thuglife ASCII Art/News Portal
http://www.thuglife.org

Joan Stark's ASCII gallery
More mainstream but rich in content regarding the different facets ASCII artscenes. Unfortunately this site is constantly plagued by Geocities bandwidth caps.
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/7373/

Granted some of these links are now repetitive, but many of the largest warehouses of ASCII art have yet to be mentioned. Listed in order of magnitude:

TEXTFILES.COM Computer Art Collection
Features a wide range of computer-oriented text-based artwork beginning with teletype (RTTY) art which predates ASCII. An archive of archives. http://www.textfiles.com/artscene/

The ACiD Artpacks Archive
Index and sorted by year. Hosts a collection of over 13 years of ASCII, ANSI, RIPscrip and other digital artwork. ftp://artpacks.acid.org/pub/artpacks/

The CHRIST Ascii Archives
Indexed and sorted by artgroup. The authoritative archive of IBM-PC and Amiga ASCII art. ftp://ftp.mimic.ca/pub/ascii/

Thuglife ASCII Art/News Portal
http://www.thuglife.org

Joan Stark's ASCII gallery
More mainstream but rich in content regarding the different facets ASCII artscenes. Unfortunately this site is constantly plagued by Geocities bandwidth caps.

The Amiga ascii scene (Now often refered to as the "oldschool scene"):
From the early 90's people made "collections" - large textfiles - with logos (file_id.diz, bbs adverts, demo group names, etc), and later rants, poems and other forms of self expression. Tools of the trade: Slash, backslash, underscore, pipe, you get the idea.
Freshpla.net has a pretty good (though not updated) archive. Yes, I know, this might be look like madness to, hm, laymen :) If you really want to have a closer look, though, check out the works of e.g. Mark Ryder, Grimlock, and... no, too many to mention. All collections should be viewed with CygnusEd in Topaz 8, even though your browser could do the trick.

The blockstyle scene
These are the nice people that make most of those NFO files. Uses the blocks in the MS-DOS charset. Two of the biggest groups are Superior Art Creations (SAC) and Chemical Reaction (CRO). Get the Damn NFO Viewer (Win32).

The newschool scene
Seems to be the part of the group-based ascii scene that stays furthest away from the warez scene. Uses e.g. $$$$$$ to fill shapes, and various other characters to make their outline smooth. Only active examples I can remember at the moment are Mimic and Remorse. Ansi happens :)

The Ansi scene
Ascii is ascii and ansi is ansi, but these scenes are closely connected. Colourized art using the MS-DOS font. There can only be one: ACID. Viewers available for most platforms, just use Google.

...and then, of course, there are those other forms of ascii art, as the hilarious The Adventures of the Boy with Immovable Hair and this wonderful flash anim synced to an Offspring song (Might be from the same author as that flash link in the parent post).

The Amiga ascii scene (Now often refered to as the "oldschool scene"):
From the early 90's people made "collections" - large textfiles - with logos (file_id.diz, bbs adverts, demo group names, etc), and later rants, poems and other forms of self expression. Tools of the trade: Slash, backslash, underscore, pipe, you get the idea.
Freshpla.net has a pretty good (though not updated) archive. Yes, I know, this might be look like madness to, hm, laymen :) If you really want to have a closer look, though, check out the works of e.g. Mark Ryder, Grimlock, and... no, too many to mention. All collections should be viewed with CygnusEd in Topaz 8, even though your browser could do the trick.

The blockstyle scene
These are the nice people that make most of those NFO files. Uses the blocks in the MS-DOS charset. Two of the biggest groups are Superior Art Creations (SAC) and Chemical Reaction (CRO). Get the Damn NFO Viewer (Win32).

The newschool scene
Seems to be the part of the group-based ascii scene that stays furthest away from the warez scene. Uses e.g. $$$$$$ to fill shapes, and various other characters to make their outline smooth. Only active examples I can remember at the moment are Mimic and Remorse. Ansi happens :)

The Ansi scene
Ascii is ascii and ansi is ansi, but these scenes are closely connected. Colourized art using the MS-DOS font. There can only be one: ACID. Viewers available for most platforms, just use Google.

...and then, of course, there are those other forms of ascii art, as the hilarious The Adventures of the Boy with Immovable Hair and this wonderful flash anim synced to an Offspring song (Might be from the same author as that flash link in the parent post).

You can get the ACiD and iCE art packs from

ACiD

iCE

The problem is that ansis nowadays exist as gif and png's. Sending lots of people to all try to download 200k files off some smaller-bandwidth server is suicide.

But with that in mind, www.ice.org has all of the iCE Packs online, and even some pre-pack ansis (since iCE began in 1990 but groups didn't start releasing packs until around 08/1992). You can search for art there, but only among the iCE work. ACiD still has a website, but that seems to be down now. But their artpacks site is still online, with lots of old packs (not viewable on the web, so you'll need an ansi viewer) at here.

There is a more comprehensive web-viewable ansi archive of almost every major pack ever released, but it appears to be down right now. Check www.idledreams.net sometime in the future to see if it's come back online I guess, that's probably what you want.

Slothy
(disclaimer: I help run iCE)

-motardo

As I remember it, claim two was what really frosted Mr. Katz, and I agreed fully with him:

2.Usage of SEA's proprietary ARC file format.

When he wrote PKZip, one of the major changes was his adamant declaration that the format of .zip files was open for all to use, and would always be so. That's where the difference was in my mind---P.K. was willing to fight on a level playing field, and may the best programmer win. For years, P.K. was the winner.

It was that format openness that allowed Info-ZIP to do their work, resulting in their claim that UnZip is ``The Third Most Portable Program in the World''. (See the tiny print at the bottom of the page for the footnote.)

I felt strongly enough about it to send in my $25 for registration. In a small way, Phil Katz was a forerunner of the Free Software movement; his software wasn't free, but his file format was---possibly an even more important freedom.

As I remember it, claim two was what really frosted Mr. Katz, and I agreed fully with him:

2.Usage of SEA's proprietary ARC file format.

When he wrote PKZip, one of the major changes was his adamant declaration that the format of .zip files was open for all to use, and would always be so. That's where the difference was in my mind---P.K. was willing to fight on a level playing field, and may the best programmer win. For years, P.K. was the winner.

It was that format openness that allowed Info-ZIP to do their work, resulting in their claim that UnZip is ``The Third Most Portable Program in the World''. (See the tiny print at the bottom of the page for the footnote.)

I felt strongly enough about it to send in my $25 for registration. In a small way, Phil Katz was a forerunner of the Free Software movement; his software wasn't free, but his file format was---possibly an even more important freedom.

--

JPEG is 32bit color (at least, there aren't any boundaries like a maximum of 256 colors) but is lossy. Borders aren't as crisp as on GIF. Therefore, JPEG is a format that's generally used for pictures.

GIF only supports max 256 colors, but the image's more crisp. GIF is therefore more used in logo's, text, and big objects. Generally the stuff you make on your computer and doesn't have much blending between colors.

(taken from http://artpacks.acid.org/pub/png/png intro.html) PNG really has three main advantages over GIF: alpha channels (variable transparency), gamma correction (cross-platform control of image brightness), and two-dimensional interlacing (a method of progressive display). PNG also compresses better than GIF in almost every case, but the difference is generally only around 5% to 25%, not a large enough factor to encourage folks to switch on that basis alone. One GIF feature that PNG does not try to reproduce is multiple-image support, especially animations;

GIF is pretty simple to implement (compared to JPEG or PNG at least).

I disagree. PNG is at least as easy to implement as GIF or JPEG with the libpng library. It is available as source, compiles out of the box for just about any platform. The license is very unrestrictive -- similar to the BSD license.