BBS Documentary: ANSI artscene

I think I know why ANSI art was singled out above ATASCII, PETSCII, etc. -- it was definitely more hardcore than anything I'd experienced doing menus for Commodore boards. But then again, I worked mostly for local Monty Python themed boards. Nobody formed groups. It was hardcore not only in the scope of the organizations, but in the sense of the art they produced.

iCE and ACiD, the two large ANSI groups featured in the episode, both have a web presence now. ACiD has a radio show on their site, which stopped producing episodes just a few months before podcasting really started to take off. And while ANSI looks great on dumb terminals, it doesn't work on Usenet or in HTML, which is why you see more ASCII art these days. I used to follow Joan Stark back when she released something every month, but all this time has passed and she's still on Geocities. In the meantime, the top Google hit for the "ascii art" search is Chris Johnson's ASCII Art Collection.

I never followed ANSI, because it never looked right on a Commodore 64, or even an Amiga 500. By the time I got a PC, I was already on the Internet. So I didn't realize that people would create gigantic scrolling murals, 80 columns wide but infinitely tall. Nor did I realize that it continued well into the 90's. This gave a strange quality to the stories, as it made things like conference calls and multi-line BBSes more common.

One thing that I always found attractive about ANSI art, ASCII art, and other character-based art forms, is the idea of constraints. In ASCII, what can you do with 95 tiles and no choice of color? That's why I'm not so fond of ASCII that cheats with computer-generated HTML color tables and tiny font sizes -- the tiles become irrelevant. Give me cats in a dozen lines or less. My favorite is the 4-line sleeping cat with the 4 for a nose, the perfect size for a Usenet signature.

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OK, how would you explain the strange purple and cyan "city" seen in satellite view of Google Maps?

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Almost all domestic cats carry a parasite that lodges in your brain and alters your behavior. Worst Stargate SG-1 episode EVAR.

(yes, I'm skeptical too -- the "alley cat" and "sex kitten" behavior patterns in the article are just too perfect.)

BBS Documentary: Making It Pay

The story of this part is also outside my realm of experience. For one, I was never a sysop, so I never had to purchase BBS software. And second, pay BBSes were rare in Phoenix.

There were four pay BBSes of note in the Phoenix area that I can remember vividly.

The first was APECS, a multi-line BBS that cost $2 an hour in the late 80's. I only got to enjoy about $20 worth, outside a "free week" where they opened up access to all the features for everyone.

The second was D-Base V, which was a homebrew BBS, and you paid for access to special features, such as "nukes" which you could add a message that would kick a particular user off the BBS for the rest of the day. People used those on me constantly. It had a profanity filter that would prevent you from typing swear words. And when you selected "Chat with Sysop" from the main menu, it would start up an Eliza-like program.

In the 90's, that's when multi-line came into its own. There were three boards of note: Sho-Tron (aka the Rock Garden), at 20 lines and 60¢/hr, Smorgas Board at 8 lines and 35¢/hr.

I have vague memories of a board called Crossroads that seemed to vaguely invoke the Internet, and a few others that may have been more business-based than I could comprehend at my young age. I think that I trained myself to just forget about any BBS that asked for money, as I was too young to earn my own money until well into my Internet years, and my computer was usually a few years out of date anyway.