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Russian ASCII Art Animated Cat From 1968

Posted by timothy on from the doing-it-the-hard-way dept.

harrymcc writes "Forty-two years ago, Russian scientists created an impressive sequence of a cat walking about — and it was all the more impressive given that the 'CGI' involved rendering hundreds of images of the cat as ASCII art, then printing out the sequence image by image and photographing it."

7 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. ASCII? by negatonium · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Since ASCII stands for "American" Standard Code for Information Interchange I think the Soviets who created this might be offended.

    1. Re:ASCII? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      A few ephemera:

      ASCII wasn't widely used until after 1967, when it underwent a major revision. It is worth noting that the Soviet Union variously purchased, reverse-engineered and stole computer designs as early as the sixties, and when they did so, they frequently brought the charsets with them to maintain program compatibility with American and Western European software.

      ...however, most of that reverse-engineering happened only later, and I for one would be surprised if ASCII was used at all in Russian computing prior to the availability of Usenet and IBM PC clones.

    2. Re:ASCII? by davidbofinger · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It's got one nice feature I wish ASCII had: the code for a digit is the same as the value of a digit. That would save a little programming boilerplate.

    3. Re:ASCII? by dmitriy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      BESM-4 manuals (pdf):
      Manual chapter: external devices code table is on PDF page 13
      Machine command poster Printer self-test output is at the top of page 2
      BESM-4 is M-220 and M-20 compatible. M-20 was released to production in 1958.

  2. If you were into the ascii art scene or BBSs by floppyraid · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There is a well done documentary on archive.org

    The guy interviewed Vinton Cerf and Philip J. Kaplan for it, amongst others you will likely recognize.

    http://www.archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary

    iirc, part 5 was all about the ascii art scene.

  3. Re:In other news... by BrokenHalo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...lolcats turn 42.

    I won't say "Get off my lawn!" but there was a time when ASCII art was regarded by the cognoscenti as totally cool. I remember having an ASCII rendering of the Mona Lisa on 14/11" fanfold on the wall of my machine room back in the '70s...

  4. Re:Rotoscoped. by MartinSchou · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yes, we all know that the ASCII animation of Episode IV was made before 1968.

    What next? Are you going to point out that The Mother of all Demos is crap because you can do better things now?