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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."

3 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: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?