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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."

31 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. In other news... by fph+il+quozientatore · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...lolcats turn 42.

    --
    My first program:

    Hell Segmentation fault

    1. Re:In other news... by Kell+Bengal · · Score: 5, Funny

      I'm in ur commune, stealin ur moviez!

      --
      Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
      altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
    2. 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...

    3. Re:In other news... by Hoi+Polloi · · Score: 2, Funny

      The problem with ascii animation is that typing that fast kills your wrists.

      --
      It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
  2. 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 riker1384 · · Score: 5, Funny

      This animation was with with the Russian version, called ASCIISKI.

    2. Re:ASCII? by Xiph · · Score: 4, Funny

      however, in ascii-art ASCII is an abbriviation of "Abnormal String of Characters Is the Image"

      --
      Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
    3. Re:ASCII? by Slack0ff · · Score: 3, Funny

      Is that what lil' john is singing about?

      --
      Everyday You see me is the worst day of my life -Office Space
    4. Re:ASCII? by faragon · · Score: 5, Informative

      Probably it is not ASCII nor EBCDIC (both dating from 1963). After searching a bit, it seems that uses its own character encoding: GOST 10859-64.

    5. 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.

    6. Re:ASCII? by ACS+Solver · · Score: 5, Informative

      The "images" were created using the BESM-4 computer. The much more widely used BESM-6 used 48 bit words and you can see its character encoding table here:

      http://www.mailcom.com/besm6/encoding_ru.html

      The BESM-4 had 45-bit words and I'm not sure what encoding it used, but it's likely to be the same or similar to the above. Note how that character table has math operators like logical conjucntion/disjunction even but lacks an exclamation mark and even two letters of the Russian alphabet. Wasn't exactly meant for word processing ;)

    7. Re:ASCII? by badran · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What do tits have to do with this?

      PS: A-SCIISKI, sounds a lot like "What about the tits?".

    8. Re:ASCII? by dangitman · · Score: 2, Funny

      Since ASCII stands for "American" Standard Code for Information Interchange

      You've got it all wrong. It stands for "American Society of Cat Illustration Innovation," informally known as the LOL Society.

      --
      ... and then they built the supercollider.
    9. 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.

    10. 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.

    11. Re:ASCII? by fm6 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I like a positive system of transliteration, ambiguity sucks :-/

      If you can't live with ambiguity, I suggest you avoid communicating with humans.

      I find it more practical to live with the fact that language is an evolving entity. That means:

      • acknowledging that conflicting sets of "rules" (conventions) exist and there's nothing you can do about it
      • learn to adapt to whatever "rules" happen to be in use
      • refrain from criticizing "illiterate" people who don't use exactly the same rules as you
      • embrace the creativity and beauty of language as it exists outside textbooks!
  3. Re:Pictures or it didn't happen! by Spacezilla · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O4mm3hXNgA

  4. That's nothing! by d1r3lnd · · Score: 5, Funny

    A year later, American scientists created an impressive sequence of a man walking about the lunar surface...

    1. Re:That's nothing! by tecnico.hitos · · Score: 3, Funny

      Who cares about the moon when we can has kittehs.

      --
      The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
  5. 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.

  6. Rotoscoped. by 6350' · · Score: 2, Funny

    This is of course neat to see, but I think it's clearly a rotoscoped sequence transferred to a printout (which is pretty cool too). Not to quibble, but this might be a better example of full-on ASCII animation:
    http://www.asciimation.co.nz/ - The classic ASCII anim of Episode IV.

    1. 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?

    2. Re:Rotoscoped. by wiredlogic · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It isn't rotoscoped. You can see the skeletonized cat toward the middle of the video. You can also make out some cracks where the different components meet at the joints.

      --
      I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
    3. Re:Rotoscoped. by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 3, Informative

      You can also do this with mplayer if compiled with the right libs.
      http://oreilly.com/pub/h/4441

    4. Re:Rotoscoped. by fm6 · · Score: 2, Informative

      I think you misunderstand what rotoscoping is. This is just plan "animation", where you use a rostrum camera to transfer your frames from paper to film. The difference here is that the frames themselves were computer generated. I'd be very curious to know whether they actually had some kind of animation software, or just used a text editor.

  7. Printer by FrankDrebin · · Score: 4, Funny

    One assumes this was printed on the Model-KI teletype, aka the KITTY.

    --
    Anybody want a peanut?
  8. Did anyone else think of... by Dogtanian · · Score: 5, Funny

    ..."Worker and Parasite"?

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    "Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
  9. Agreed. by MRe_nl · · Score: 2, Funny

    Impressive would have been two consecutive hits on the cat with a railgun...

    --
    "Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
  10. 42 years ago... by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...Russian scientists with access to a computer smoked some pot.

  11. Flash? by DarwinSurvivor · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So in 1968, the russians take a bunch of standard characters, print them out onto paper and film it. 42 years later the Americans spend millions of dollars creating a convoluted ineficient browser plugin (flash) in order to display it.

    Reminds me of a certain expensive pen...

    1. Re:Flash? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      > Reminds me of a certain expensive pen...
       
      ...that is an urban legend to begin with.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen