PETSCII-logo by Tao for the BBS Virtual Light, online 1996-1998.
Tag Archives: 1990s
C64 BBS graphics for Black Rain (Demozoo-entry) by unknown artist. Made some time before 1993 when the BBS changed its name.
By Yvonne Adams, 1991-1993.
Coloured ASCII by Lorrie Carrington (lc), late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Her work is available in various archives without colour, but they were in colour on her own website. HTML supports millions of colours (although a 256-limit was good for compatibility at the time), so it looks a bit different from classic ASCII and ANSI that uses 8 or 16 colours.
Other ASCII-artists also used HTML-colour. See for example Joan Stark and Allen Mullen. Maybe there was a lot of colourful ASCII that was only preserved without colour…
Famous paintings in coloured HTML ASCII by Allen Mullen, probably from the first half of the 1990’s. Originals by Da Vinci, Dali, Michaelangelo, Monet, Brueghel, Raphael, Van Gogh and Vermeer.
More info and graphics here.
Booking a train with the German BTX videotex service in 1994. I believe the whole screen is text-mode, using all the tricks of BTX (custom characters, multi-colour characters, etc). Video by Anna Christina Naß, via pagetable where more videos are available.
By Absent Spinsister, 1997-1998. More at sixteencolors.
Coloured ASCII-work in HTML by Allen Mullen. His oldest dated work is from 1994, but he was probably active long before that. His great archive of Usenet ASCII goes back to 1991. He stopped working with ASCII around 1996.
He called this gifscii, because it involved converting GIFs to ASCII. He also called it pictures rather than art, to avoid discussions and insults about the merit of his work.
Mullen often drew the images from scratch with a Wacom tablet. He used three shades of grey which the gifscii converter turned into $, M and !. With a word processor’s replace function he’d introduce areas of C and :. He used macros to even out the edges and did a lot of manual editing. “I don’t believe it would be practical to try to copy my methods. There’s a lot more to it than I can describe here.”
Colour could be added in browsers such as Netscape Gold by selecting the text and choosing a colour. Most browsers supported a palette of 256 colours. Of course, colour could also be added manually in the HTML code.