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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."

19 of 125 comments (clear)

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

    ...lolcats turn 42.

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

      I'm in ur commune, stealin ur moviez!

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  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"

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    3. Re:ASCII? by Slack0ff · · Score: 3, Funny

      Is that what lil' john is singing about?

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    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 ;)

  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.

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

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

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  6. Did anyone else think of... by Dogtanian · · Score: 5, Funny

    ..."Worker and Parasite"?

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  7. 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?

  8. 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.

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  9. 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

  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...