ANSI Art and the BBS Scene

1984

Glitched pixels scrolling past. The visual descendants of ANSI block characters lighting up dial-up BBS screens. Place: The worldwide BBS scene; ACiD Productions, iCE Advertisements, the warez and demo BBSes Figures: RaD Man, co-founder of ACiD Productions (1990, with Shadow Demon, Grimm, The Beholder, Phantom) · Many Axe (later Frozen Tormentor), founder of iCE (1991, founded in Canada) · the artist scenes of Toronto, Montreal, Detroit, the European 4-color cracker boards The IBM PC ships with Code Page 437, an extended ASCII set that includes block characters (▀ ▄ █ ░ ▒ ▓), box-drawing characters (─ │ ┌ ┐ └ ┘ ╔ ╗), and assorted geometric primitives. Combine those 256 glyphs with the PC's 16 text-mode colors, drop them on an 80x25 character grid, and you have a working image format that transmits over a 1200-baud line in about three seconds. The image is the screen. By 1984 every serious BBS has an opening screen done in ANSI. ACiD Productions (1990) and iCE Advertisements (1991) formalize the scene as competing art groups, releasing monthly art packs distributed via the boards themselves. Some pieces are loading-screen ads for warez BBSes; some are gallery pieces with no commercial purpose. Resolution: 80x25. Palette: 16. File extension: .ANS. Some of the best of it survives in archive.org's textfiles.com mirror. Video: Jason Scott's ARTSCENE episode tells the history of the ANSI art crews who turned Code Page 437 into a scene.