Brings back old memories of TheDraw in the DOS days. Made some ANSI art back for some pirate boards in the early 90s. Someone archived it and I was able to find one of the ones I did.
I remember when I switched from TheDraw to the amazing new technology of RIPScript, which was like some insanely convoluted svg precursor, but allowed for some pretty metal vector graphix loading screens. http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/PROGRAMS/GRAPHICS/RIPS...
Then about five years ago I started switching all my web development away from pngs and gifs to svgs. The more things change...
In DOS you needed to load ANSI.SYS in your CONFIG.SYS file in order to see ANSI terminal codes. Later on PC Magazine or some other company made ANSI.COM that you could load at any time as a Terminate and Stay Resident program to see ANSI codes.
It basically uses the CGA 80x25 text 16 color screen on PC and PC clones.
I could be wrong, but I think the terminal codes were based on VT-100 or something with the IBM font added. When I had an Amiga 1000 I had to set my terminal to VT-100 and load a font that had the IBM PC character set in it, because the Amiga fonts had different character sets in them that didn't look right.
>This is purely an American misnomer, because early IBM PC and clones in the European nations did not ship with the IBM CP437 code page by default.
A Hungarian ANSI guy here. In Central/Eastern Europe we used the IBM CP852 which only tweaked some of the already accented characters to the language correct one. So we still had ANSI scene with the 8bit block characters.
I was gonna say - textfiles.com has some good examples of 'what is ANSI art?', but to really get down into 'What's the big deal?', people need to see the iCE, ACiD, and RELiC packs from circa 1993-94.
In the early days of the web I remember seeing an ASCII art pheonix made of (if I remember correctly) AGCT dna-like sequences. It rendered really slowly in netscape. I'd love to know how today's browsers handle it but alas it is lost in time...
If no one archived it, it's gone. If no one submitted it to an archive, it's hard to find. If someone saved it to a floppy disk, it's probably gone [1]
Unique is one way to describe it. I have an archive of some (sadly, not all) of our stuff, but after looking through it just now there's a lot that isn't exactly, um, appropriate? I guess the whole point was to be shocking but, if I'm honest, the tables have turned. A lot of it offends and embarrasses /me/ now.
Lol! Less acid. I called frequently. I remember having a chat session with the sysop and was amazed that he could type rapidly in that funky mixed-case all the time. Maybe he had a foot pedal for a shift key?
http://imgur.com/tscJzzs
If your interested in looking at amazing ones, look for Jed from the ACID group (or others?) His stuff was amazing. I wonder what he is doing now.