Sixteen Colors: Archiving the Evolution of ANSI and ASCII Art

you can connect it from anything yeah we're good y I start hey everybody uh you ready to talk about I want to start with just um to explain what's going on in the room

here there we go that's so so what will you guys see on this other screen I'm going to show here to anybody looking at the recording is that we're looking at um individuals drawing ansy live as we talk um so you can hopefully kind of get an idea of what it looks like for someone to start with a blank canvas and draw some an and why is that how do we know that it's live somebody draw dong uh it might happen I specifically I specifically asked someone not an individual not to do it because it was likely it would happen which probably means he's going to do it yeah wellong or it didn't happen right

theas all right well the Wi-Fi is going bad so the recording might not have this if you switch over are you on the conventions Network it's not showing the um speaker network uh try conventions yeah that's what I'm on right now and that's what's not doing well I frankly it's not a crucial part of things so I'd rather not the knock is getting knocked down yeah I'd rather not slow things down um just for that so it's going to be a little limited to people in the room um but what we see is some live drawing over on this other screen so first of all my name is Doug I went by Bo scarlet dncc and I still do

online on a site called 16 colors which is an archive of ancy art created by the underground art scene ansy and aski over the past 20 years um the what we're going to talk about today is what an is uh the topic is a little bit of misn I'm not going to talk much about aski but they run in parallel uh it's just easier to focus on one instead of looking at all of them the relationship it had to bulletin board systems the underground scene that came out of bulletin board an ansy politics of the underground art scene what I really want to talk about which is ansy as art and if you have time at the end a little bit about

archiving ancc and I have a ton of content to get through so let's just dive right into it ANC is a primitive form of computer art that uses characters instead of pixels or lines um so it's kind of a subset of what's known as text mode art what most people probably picture for text mode art is asking um and Asi in the computer world is mainly just the lower end stain restic character you see on the keyboard used to draw pictures um there's a lot of information about there out there about how text mode already existed long before computers with uh typewriters print Setters anything that took characters and put them on a page people

started to draw artwork with them if you look at it in comparison to an art we see pretty big difference in what the final product looks like talk about ansy what we're really talking about is an is Dos ansy is specific to Doss it used uh a couple set of specifications and became known as kind of this Cal term of an art that really doesn't actually mean anything except to the people that were creating it it's made up of code page 437 which is a character set available in DOS it also uses anti-escape seat code sequences which were sets of letters and num that did cursor positioning color all those various aspects and when we're

in ansy we have eight foreground colors and eight background colors uh sorry 16 eight of them the first eight can be foreground and background the second eight are only foreground in standard NCR and when I talk about all these characters available there's 256 of them the ones the top 128 are what's know as the extended character set in traditional ASI only the first 128 the other thing I'll point out to anybody who's a developer and works with ASI versus Unicode versus all the other character sets is that in the art scene ASI refers also to code page 437 unless you're talking about the Amiga asy World which had its own character set the other aski on other platforms but when

we're talking about ANC it's largely about 10 characters that are what we refer to as blocks and of those 10 the most important are these four which are known as F1 F2 F3 and F4 they were used to make a solid block of color as well as shading so we see red here that would be the foreground color we see black that would be the background color so talking about ANC is really irrelevant if you don't understand the Pooler void systems the BBS scene came up in the late 70s is when they first came out and they thrived in the ' 80s and early '90s and they're really a disconnected Anonymous form Communications uh on computers hobbyists

had a way now that they could talk to other computers and they came up with butin board systems if you had a computer and you had a modem you could run a bulon board system and vice versa if you had a computer in modem and you had the number to a bulson board you could call it early early bulton boards look like this just straight text um this isn't a modern incarnation of an old bson board but this is what we're looking at on B boards but at a point system operators particularly of Dos based systems realize they could use code page 437 and ANC escape code sequences to create menus that are a little more pleasing to the eye a little

easier to read not just that straight monochrome screen the problem is if you look at ancy it looks like this this is the wrong character encoding we'll ignore that but it's an escape code and then a bracket and a bunch of numbers and letters that specify character positioning color it's really not very easy to work with so you see simple menus like that one I just showed but in 1986 Ian Davis released the draw the draw was a guey ansy editor and the guey was ansy and it allowed uh artists to use their keyboard to just draw and not worry about character codes not worry about an escapes code sequences you see uh down here at the bottom this blue bar with 10

numbers the way Davis got around drawing these extended character sets was that um there were I think 10 sets of characters 10 each that were mapped to the function keys so that's how that those shading characters are F1 F2 F3 and F4 it's cuz they were 1 2 3 and four on that character set and so from this system operators could start creating more elaborate screens um start really customizing their boords game operators on bull of boards in particular would use ANC to make a more immersive experience make a lot more like the games people are playing on Doss outside of bullets and Boards now I don't know how many of you use bullets and Boards I I see some heads going up

but I for those that didn't I want to kind of frame it as to what we're talking about here it's not about pixels per inch it's not about resolution what matters is that you can see 80 of these characters we're talking about across the screen and 25 down if someone to wanted to represent something more elaborate they would uh go what we' call beyond the 25 lines they would create an an that was taller than this but it would scroll off the screen so when you log into a bullon board system this is what it looks like you get one character at a time drawing across the screen and these long anties became known as

scrollers and so when you're logging into a board this is how you get your information it's Alo how you get the text based information as well you're really getting one character at a time drawn on the screen and this for those that have used boards this is a simulated 14400 VA modem um it's pretty fast for a lot of us that first logged in but if you compare it to uh if you were using dialup internet on AOL God forbid or any other internet provider you were probably at 57.6k so this is that was four or five * faster than this a lot of us start at speeds four or five times slower than that so out of this bulleon where these

bulon board systems and out of ANC the scene starts to develop it's not surprising to all of you that are developed with computers that people start fractioning off into little groups and that's what we know as the underground art scene the first group that came about was aces of ANC art otherwise known as AAA and it was really just an affiliation people would just with when they drew their antsy they put their handle on it put AAA next to it and that was the end of it but shortly after AAA acid and Ice were formed and they each somewhat independently maybe not it's hard to say came up with this form of releasing zip files of all their

artwork a lot of groups started to follow but acid and Ice are really the ones that I'll focus on a lot not focus on I'll mention them a lot and that's just because they really did dominate the ansy scene for 15 years a lot of groups came about in that time but they stuck around they Nam kind of the what everybody strived to be equal with what these groups were let's really just focus on the first three or four years of the an they were vocalized by area code and that was the nature of modems that you it was cost prohibitive to dial outside of your own area code so artists um T any grouping on and Boards

tended to be localized that way just because it's cost prohibitive if we ignore freaking and all that stuff which is a whole other topic um they take all their artwork they'd zip it up into what became known later as art packs and the groups were not just ancy artists they were ask the artists they were high resolution or as we knew them at the time DGA artists coders musicians authors that did poetry and other stuff people who were solely administrative staff that help the group running help group members help manage pack distribution the packs are the important part of what was created kind of administratively by an they're generally distributed on a regular basis monthly in most

cases um as we got to IRC it became a lot and FTP it became a lot easier to transfer this stuff around and itain contained all the artwork created by the group members since the previous release it was a lot like the software distribution model for wees group um bulletin boards when it was just bulletin boards and we didn't really have much internet the way we's groups distributed their PIR software is they would they had to set the bolon board systems particularly in their home area code they would upload a copy of that piece of software and then there were members of the group that were called couriers and their sole job was to grab

these pieces these software releases send it to a couple boards outside of the area code then a couple more cers pick that up and it would kind of spider its way across the country um an was that that's it's what you had to do yeah you spr to do that there are a lot of ways around it I'm kind of oversimplifying things there was freaking there were um message networks that came up that you could use to transfer some of this stuff and do some of this communication um again a lot of these things could spend half an hour talking about just each one um but art groups took the same model they realized that

it worked and so they they would they were trying to get this artwork out so people would see it so people would um want to be a part of the group or want work from the group and they realize this was the easy way to distribute it um particularly with the ties that an had with the wees Community it worked out pretty well the packs contained artwork as we mentioned they're mainly to support bolon boards there were login and log off screens that were where users were either using your password apply for an account checking status the account there were menus that obviously showed the options that were available on bulletin board message headers that

would sit the top the messages and tell you who created the ANC the most important piece though were BBS advertisements they were kind of the lifeblood of ancr especially because it it pushed that boundary of the 25 lines allowed artists to really get Crea with the art that they were creating and it kind of symbolizes or demonstrates the symbiotic nature of an and gold boards not only were packs used to distribute art and have the artists get their stuff seen and raise their Prestige there's also a way for BS and boards to advertize if you're Bolton board had a piece of art particular in a group at the level of iso or acid a lot more

people are going to see that artwork um it's it's going to have wees groups notice you and potentially use you as a distribution point for their wees so it really was a level of prestige to have this art drawn for you and so so BBS advertisements were again kind of the lifeblood of ANC art the problem if you notice this one that just scrolled by is it's really long um and the draw limited you to 100 lines at a time so that became problematic for a lot of artists as they really start to push the boundaries there a way to Cade piles of Dos and get around it but the real solution was uh 94 acid released

the app acid draw which pump pumped that limit up to a th000 lines but that's not even really the most important part of the draw it it quickly replaced uh sorry acid draw I quicklyl the draw as the de facto editor for the NCC and it was because of the Thousand line limit but it also introduced something that it as it include an acid view a few months earlier which is the concept of VG preing mode artists up until this time were working 25 lines at a time at that full 80x 45 screen but ASD draw allowed an artist in real time to see what their ansy looked like blown out viewed from top to bottom as a high

resolution image and it really pushed the quality of ANC art as we look at some of the art I'll point out the times they were but in particular the proportions really got better because previously an artist could only pair 25 lines at a time so if you have the head at line one and the legs at line 300 you couldn't really make a comparison to do good proportions Pax also had some just administrative things they had a member list that showed the members of the group contact information their role was really just an excuse to draw more art there's also the info file which was a newsletter basically for the group to say what was going on in the group new

members smack talk other groups whatever they uh felt they wanted to talk about in the pack and that gets us to the politics um again if you spent more than 5 minutes on the internet you know people fight with each other and snip over stupid things the anene was very competitive so you see this hierarchy that I mentioned ice and acid were generally at the top level number of groups would float in and out of that top level status and we really see a number of levels below the way in an artists generally worked in the scene was they would discover ansy on a local bulleon board they'd start drawing a little bit they discover

there's a local group join that group and in the process discover someone like iser acid discover the national scene get on IRC and join one of these mid-level groups and slowly work their way up to a group like ISO acid or Mirage Gothic Legend these other groups that came up at that high level um so I mentioned the we scene there was a pretty close relationship between ancy and the hacker scene artists a lot of what they did was drawing info files for software releases working for boards that cre that released software and a lot of artists got into this in the first place just to get access to those Wares that was really the goal of a lot of artists was

let me draw for a board that has Elite status that I can't get access to and if I draw them Mark suddenly I have access to all the pired software I want all the cards I want all the freeing information I want but it created a almost too competitive environment to where cheating arose the first form of cheating in ansy is what's known as ripping so an artist would take something that one ANC artist drew and they'd take it as their own you see here on the right uh Tempest tailes ansy from Ice in 1992 on the left is Prim evil acid from 1993 nor ripping happened in small groups localized and nobody really realized it cuz people in the greater SE

never saw it but this one was discovered right away as soon as the pack was released because of the status of ice and acid primeval was immediately shunned removed from Acid never heard from again I was showing this to Christian worth who's running around with the camera who was Brad man of acid uh he he has run acid through his whole life and he told me a story I either never knew or didn't remember which his primeval was not actually a ripper he was a member of ice that joined under a fake name in order to make acid look bad by releasing ripped artwork so this really ends up just showing backstabbing and collusion that went on in the an

scene particularly between ice and acid we see a lot of sniping between them back and forth in packs um they a lot of backstabbing stuff like the Primeval ansy uh taking over IRC channels um making animations that make fun of the other group this always takes a little longer than I wanted to get to the punch line it's as you know 30 something year old isn't as funny as it was when we were [Music] 15 this was by Sonic acid in 93 I think this is oh this is also an an anation which I'm not showing a lot of but animation was Poss POS in ancr um you don't see it a lot after probably 93 or so people really focused

on the scrollers if you saw animation it was generally in a uh something from the demo scene or in a demo we also see stuff from yes so how do they do it I mean like it's not obviously it's pred gift by about a million years um well it's not I mean if you think about the way the screen was drawn it just instead of drawing the character at the end it would draw a somewhere else on the screen oh so they're actually move they're then making a move command exact so all the codes we saw for the yeah it's come something kind of gloss over but yeah the there's cursor positioning cursor movement clear screen

commands depending on um if we have a bunch of time in the end I'm going to show you a really long animation um that uses it's it's just it's pretty much what I consider the best anation out there by J best anation artist out there um but so I did the same same thing I don't know if you guys can read it very well but that in the mouth of that guy is a an acid logo so we just see a lot of that sniping back and forth the other thing is known as GIF 2 ants and it's using software to generate an antsy from a high resolution image um if you see a straight jip 2 ants I it's so

kind of taboo I couldn't find one in the time for the talk to create a GI 2 ant that the software is hard to find but it's if you see ay two ants it wouldn't be mistaken for the art I'm showing you today it's pretty mediocre compared to it but what some artists who were were talented realizes it was a shortcut they could minimize it down to just the outlines and use and use um use gif2 ants to make that trans transition so all they had to do was color and shade it and not worry about the outlines which to some people was the TVs hardest part so this I didn't put this example together I know the artists here that's

being accused to ants he has denied it I don't know the real story um I respect both the accuser and the artist who knows this is what people are looking for when they accuse someone of J 2 ANS if we look at this piece of work that was created from that Source material and we overlay the two it's the outlines are near exact you generally don't see that when someone's handrawing an antsy from Source material as an example um Christian actually put this together but this this is one piece of source material with three different interet of it and none of them take the exact outlines the exact proportions the exact angles um as an AC artist for one thing

you you have to make some compromises to fit in the medium so this is more what we would expect when we compare our piece of source material and not that exact comparison that we see on the the previous slide so the ANC scene is really a quick rising fall in 1990 we see the first pack releases by 2000 by 1997 we Peak at about 700 packs in that year and it quickly falls off it's not surprising the web's released people start to really get access to the internet and the web and bolts and boards just aren't as relevant there Doss isn't as relevant because people are using Windows Linux Mac OS so it's just not doesn't have the level of

relevance that it once did so it just starts to kind of plun in now the thing that happens in that time is that the competitive starts to disappear we start to see a lot more collaboration uh you see a lot more what are referred to as joints joints are anes created by more than one artist someone would start an outline transfer the file to another artist he would do a little work it go back and forth until they had a final product but in early 2000s Curtis wedley otherwise known as EO released a web version sorry a Windows version of his editor Pablo draw and it introduced a client server model it's what we're seeing on this other

screen um um there's again I don't know it might be up to a dozen artists now but a lot of people volunteered today to draw for the talk while went on so that you guys could see what it is involved in going from a blank canvas to drawing ANC um and it it just really raised the collaboration level of ancr as an example we don't need as much because we have the SL we did get this second projective but in 2005 I put together put up a Pablo server for a month uh gave everybody the the login information and encourage as many people as possible to draw over A month's time we drew this long elaborate screen for

uh a demo Convent de demo party called pilgrimage and it really shows kind of a progression of styles and artists and what was possible now that we could all just draw at the same time that's awesome so now we get to what I think is important art and right work should be is ansy as art to me an is comparable to the pop art of the 20th century we're seeing something that was created for function that was created for advertising that in the end is Art on its own even though it kind of had those monetary and functional purposes to start with and we we just see this art come out of it that is amazing in

retrospect what they were able to do with medium We There is kind of some formality out of the way which is the way viewing anany has changed um since dos the the biggest piece of my inua is if we look at this ansy here and we look at those shading characters we're talking about to the right of each one you see a solid line that's what's known as the ninth bit or the ninth pixel in ansy essentially an characters are 9 by 16 it's an oversimplification but basically that's what they are but when you look at a VGA preview mode and see that line disappears a lot of artists care about the difference between the

two um I don't think it's worth worrying too much about but there are some artists actually there's a pack release this year where someone made sure that people were looking at it in the right mode because it matters enough to them it changes the proportions a little bit there's some shading techniques used um and then VGA preview mode again people aren't really looking at it five lines at a time now they're looking at it in some form of BGA mode no matter where they're looking at n even if you look at it in Pablo um it's not taking up the whole screen it's not a CRT screen which has different levels of blacks and little things like that so let's reset

though let's go back to 1992 1993 Pablo draw is not out yet these are some pieces of art that are being created by the top artists in the ancc this is the level of work that they're taking from I'm not even show you what comes before this cuz it's so primitive um we're really starting to push the boundaries of ansy you don't really see anything over 100 lines because of the limitations of the draw um but 1994 ASD draw comes out we'll jump a little bit to 1997 and we really see a difference in the quality of what people are able to create we see a lot longer anes they they look more like high resolution

images when you zoom out whereas those those earlier ones would wouldn't really be confused you can tell that it's kind of a lower um you know it's low low res art it doesn't take have the same level of artistic value in I mean it does and this ansy wouldn't exist without those early artist what's that detail right it's and the you know they wouldn't this wouldn't exist without the early artist you know there's always a progression in any medium where everybody's ined what was Creed before um and I jumped in my 97 for a reason we saw that graph it Peaks at 97 uh as kind of a what I refer to as symbolic it wasn't at the time but

a symbolic gesture in 1997 is that acid stopped releasing ANC all together in 1997 they continued to produced art as an art group but it was solely high resolution images he's doing there it was solely high resolution images um they dropped ancr and that's when people in the scene and and outside the scene started to refer to Anie as dead ancy you constantly heard the refrain that ancy is dead after 19 97 but it it didn't die I'll touch that in a second but the other thing we see starting in 1997 roughly is what we refer to as new school ansy we start to jump to a a style that evolves from the old school

ansy the best example I have here is this ansy on the left is by Lord sth of ice in 1995 on the right is avenging angel in 2006 don't confuse this with a rip it was a remix like you see in the music scene avenging Angel decided he wanted to take um an old ansy by respected artist and show what he would do with it in the current style um it's hopefully some of it's fairly obvious I tend to live in it and see it really easily but if we look at the old school ANC we see very symmetric and this screen is not scaling very well but we see very symmetrical shading it's yellow

and brown the Shaded Brown we don't see a lot of variation whereas if we look at the one on the right that shading is a lot more sporadic and a lot less intentional there's also a lot more harsh shading if we look under her chin and in her hair um those are all little things that symbolize new school ansy there's also little things that you look at the background can scaling doesn't show it very well but uh Lord sa s is really just a plain blue background but uh avenging Angel starts to throw in some little details that weren't there in the original piece you may have noticed a lot of this art is from comic books that's another

Trend that really flows through ansy is what we refer to as comic rips I tend to think that a large part of that is that comic books have the the same kind of color palette and they have the sharp outlines that you see in ansy it Blends itself really well to ansy Art so we see a lot of comic book art um all the way through up till now lots of it comic rips but what happened um is that artist started to shun it a little bit and started to look down on artists that did comic rips and started to to brag about creating 100% original ancy and so we start to see artists using photographs

using their own line drawing um and jumping into creativity that wasn't in the ansy scene um again I I love all ansy art but early on there a lot of artists weren't very creative there were a few that are really well known for creating original art but most of it really drawn from these comic rips um I probably didn't hurt that who were mostly teenager boys who had a lot of comic books lying around but we jumped to these these ones that are more creative as the scene evolves there's also a little Trend in ancy I like to talk about is refer to his goop in the NCC uh you see it here dripping from this guy's

mouth and his hand uh it really represented anything dripping slime blood um just drippy stuff dripping from other unknown objects this is where I kind of say it turns into almost like a Family Guy joke early people see go and like oh that's great it looks awesome on a ncy it's a great technique then everybody's using it everybody's using a lot and it becomes again A Little P but then there are a few artists that start to use it more just because of that until it gets to a point where it's accepted again and people still use goo um today it's I mean it works well with the character sets that you're given we've looked a lot of pictures today PS

as we call them Inc and that somewhat reflects the way ANC scene was that they were really a second class citizen in the early ANC scene fonts were just slapped on the bottom by the artist a lot of artists you can identify them just based on the fonts they created because they all pretty much look the same but in 1996 a group named a was formed and all focused on fonts and worked to make fonts as reputable as pics to where they got to a point where there were fonts that were so elaborate they just stood that as pictures on their own and font artists were no longer looked at as kind of the bottom

run of ansy so we get to some very elaborate ones um that obviously could just be a picture on their own there's a lot of pulling from graffiti style in hansy that you'll see in the fonts if we zoom in here for those not used to to reading anany in purple here it says 20 then seven in R numerals VI I and then inch 27 in was an an group from the early 2000s so the last kind of trend I want to talk about is this increase in composition in an this is actually a really good really good an by silver rat um I keep getting the year it's probably 96 or 97 um but we see a little bit of what's

called floating head syndrome in an this is not a great example of it um wheel floating head is just a front view of uh a character and then a front view of another character and just heads stocked on top of each other this one does take the profile get the hand in there but still we see the background doesn't have a lot going on just a little shading and a font slapped on the bottom we see some attempts by PMS here to do a little more there's some foliage creeping in but as artists progress as we get VGA preview mode we start to see artists really look at every aspect of the image top to

bottom and think about each section as it would be viewed till we get to anes like this spawn one where we see detail in every line of this cape spawns head which never has detail because it's just black but this is the section I really want to focus on we see multiple layers here there's the smoke and then there cape and then there's chains and artists are really looking at every line as we go down as being part of the ansy instead of background just being f that kind of gets through all these Trends now um I just want to run through a bunch of anses from the last 5 or 10 years this is actually one of them snuck

it in here that um zombie thing with the yellow background was as well because again people said in 1997 that the ANC scene died um it didn't it it changed it morphed it became just about artists wanting to draw there were no there there are still bu boards they're not prominent um and I just want people to see part I mean particular some old ancy artists that may not have looked into anything since 1996 1997 to see that artists have really stepped up their game and they're creating things that we never would have seen particularly ' 92 93 even 96 97 artists have taken to a whole level um and are creating things that when you see it in high high

resolution you may not even realize that it's in an using text characters to create this because artists have really pushed the boundaries of what they can do with ansy especially when we start to see longer answers there's actually one I'll try to show you at the end that was too big for the uh slide software to even take um it's I think 10,000 lines it's amazing it's a whole story but artists have really started to to play with what they can do in ANC and create just great pieces of art this is where I started just Babble and get passionate about it and not really have much to say but there's a lot of great

artists out there that didn't start till after 1997 or kind of new in 1997 that would blow away honestly anything that was created in the early days but that's kind of been I I encourage you all to go to look up more of this stuff um a lot of this background Ma I couldn't show a ton of art but I want to talk a little bit about archiving The ancc and what has been done as far as that goes like I said I run 16 colors which is an a website that takes all these packs and puts them online um I wouldn't have ever started 16 colors if not for the dark domain DVD which was created Again by Christian

work um that took everything that he could find on FTP sites on his own hard drives start digging around other people um electronic magazines art packs uh editing tools all these scene related things and he released a DVD I snatched it up put out 16 colors which on day one was really just a web version of the packs dark domain but they could be viewed um you know on the web high resolution you didn't need a special viewer to to look at them like you did for the DVD uh and it's grown since then people have uploaded there have been large batches of files I've gotten from people throughout the community we've added about 4 packs we had close to 4,000

packs 150,000 files 20 years of packs but taking on an effort like 16 colors is hard for indexing when in 1992 when all 1993 we started all this nobody thought about a website that would have 150,000 images we did the best we could um Doss for those that don't know it's p n but here it doesn't it was an 11 character limitation eight characters a period 3 characters so what we did was we would put an abbreviation for the artist at the beginning of the file but I was L Scarlet as we mentioned earlier there was an artist named Lord saw we both used LS so there's no uniqueness there it's a terrible identification skill

um the multiple artists were the same thing the joints would be or us generally uh and pxs groups generally used an abbreviation for their group and then a month and date or all month in year or year and month or a pack number uh the pile dates on the packs are kind of useless because of FTP and other file transfers they don't keep that original file date so you try to parse out these dates but um there are some problems will make it kind of a tedious one which is that December 2011 and November 2012 have no distinction there're also groups that use the numbering which can be tough not impossible to pull out with

Rex compared to a date there groups like acid who just to make our life easy switched from the date scheme to a number scheme at some point so you can't even say all acid packs use this pattern so in 1994 acid relase sauce which in some ways was meant to remedy this problem think of it a lot like exif that we have now it was metadata standard for attaching 128 bytes on the end of a file and putting some metadata in artist name group name month of releas or date of the the file but it was used very inconsistently not every group used it in particular not surprising since acid released it ice never used sauce um I I

should have asked somebody but I think they even may have removed it if an artist used it and they had their own specification they were using artists that did use it weren't consistent in and of themselves they might put their handle they might put their handle with the bowels replaced bu numbers they might put something crazy just because they're bored uh and it doesn't really help me index it at all um multiple artists same thing sometimes groups would put various or multiple artists sometimes they would list all the artists as we H into the 2000s and there's five and six people working on a group there's a character limitation that was hit uh group name same problem

so with 16 colors we have kind of decided not to use sauce it's displayed with an individual image but we don't use it for indexing we tried it at one point and it just creates more bad data than good so we're working on a way to just have user you know in hindsight user created content tagging metadata to make this a lot more easy to Index this Talk's not really focused on 16 colors but we're trying to get that up soon um it's hard in your spare time to get all that up but when I'm talking about 16 colors and ANC 16 isn't trying to own ANC or be the ANC people we're just one set of

people doing it um we have all the parks we have packs we have out on GitHub um thank you to them because they removed a restriction on archive size or repository size it's over two gigs and my actually I think it's three and a half gigs which is much larger than any GitHub archive normally is um but it's out there for people to cool down people to fork for people to add to um for people to mirror for them to take off and make their own site just like 16 colors I don't care I just I just want this information out there I want to keep the history and make sure it's preserved especially as we move further

and further from dos I'm not the only one doing it the main one also uh archiving ANC art is Jason Scott of textfiles.com I think a lot of you are familiar with him from Defcon and other places um if you're not he's basically a computer historian anything computers Computer History he want wants to know about but he did create a documentary called the BBS documentary that I recommend to anybody interested in this history there's a section on ancy art as well on that documentary um the only question at this point that I have is about the future of NC I would love to keep people see people continue to draw there's probably two dozen or so active artists there's

actually been a big upturn inactivity thanks to I hate to say Facebook U but everybody's on Facebook whether you like it or not and we've been able to pull in a lot of the old artists and get them drawing again um it's it's really nice to see some of these names that you haven't seen for 10 years actually you know putting characters to anses there are people trying to make it easy for people to continue drawing for people to start drawing although I haven't really seen a new artist probably in a decade uh Curtis is working on Pablo draw there's a version that works on Mac Linux and windows the client server Works across all those

platforms so there's really no excuses anymore you can't get ASD draw running in DOS box or whatever um we also have a webbased editor that is in its early stages but it's at draw. colors. net that's also on our GitHub archive anybody wants to help out uh 16 colors is also on GitHub uh the the tools used to convert the anses to highres images also on GitHub it's all very open we love help from anybody input from anybody criticism from anybody um it's really looked at as a community thing 16 colors um for 10 years has mostly been me over the past three or so uh there's someone named Brian Cassidy who has actually most of the existing code is

his he's done a great job couple other people will help me over time Dan stev and um Thomas aot have doing a lot as well um it's kind of the end I also wanted to thank um I decided to do this because of the mentor program I really didn't know what that meant but it made me feel a little better about doing it but I didn't really know what a mentor would help with but Brendan has been awesome um I think his input made this a much better presentation from start to finish um so beyond that does anybody have any questions yeah yeah um sometime sometimes in 1998 there was a different type of format

where Xin where it drew it drew Vector Arc even though oh R you're talking about rip scrip rip scrim yeah it was coming over through the modem but it was actually pointing out where to draw and filling the colors yeah I think um Christian do you know when rip started probably more like 9945 um but it took a little while to really uh yeah so there's a vector art for format um that called Rip script um I would I might we you have to do another session I'll try to pull it up if people stop asking questions if anybody wants to see it but not only was it Vector art and it had fills and stuff but the only

way to create it showed the creation of it so anytime you looked at rip script it would you watch it get drawn and also erase as well and erase was the whole process so a lot of artists realize they could use this kind of as animation as well and they' use it to scrub pieces and put new pieces in kind of create animation it's actually been really hard to convert into because nobody really not that many people picked it up um there are uh Pablo draw can see it um there's a couple other things that can convert it I don't think there are any editors that work on Windows um but it is it is cool to look at it's kind of a

predecessor to flash in a way um but also made me think of Xin so Xin was a text mode format released by asset it was also IDF format that was similar that was released by somebody else um and they were they gave you the ability to customize the pallet um and go up to I don't know 36 million or so colors and customize the character set so artists could they were no longer limited to 256 characters or the 16 colors but it was still text characters and there's a lot of cool stuff made from that anybody else yes where can we get uh it's just search for it but it's P.C is where it's at it's also in the

Mac App Store did the anti artists ever to like demo competition or have their own oh yeah so um there were a few well let me back up so there were the the only ones run by the an scene competition wise that I know of were on when on IRC but there are a lot of specific ones blender in particular that was were very popular blender gave you I believe an hour to draw and it um gave three random words and you had to put those into your piece so um blender is the only this is a big one there's a few others but there are a lot of demo parties there's still um evoke which is I always forget what city

it's in it's in Europe um it's coming up soon they still do a an anany competition every year um but in the 9s basically every demo party had an anany competition um and they would it back then it was you had to draw it on premise as things have gotten smaller it's now you had to you had to draw it that year and not have released it now Evo kind of loosened that and he could have put it in a pack um so yeah there were competitions uh the main one I think of is blender which was not out of demo party but um the the demo scene are funny because you'd think they worked together

a lot more than they did but demos were a lot more popular in like Europe and anany in America Australia and a few other places anybody else

awesome anybody wants to wait a second I'll try to show you that talking about why doesn't Bradman have a shirt in this thing yeah on the on the drawing I couldn't tell you for sure there was yeah there was definitely something going on between Bradman and behind you know that so there's this whole thing see I know why there's well if you're Facebook friends with him you know why I'll say that oh oh it's on now he um Christian's a runner so he puts pictures from his runs up that's that's what it com from yeah I don't think that's called running I think there's definitely something else that just happened but Christian has an interesting

relationship with the an can we um oh no this is being report anyway so this is one of the really long ones I was talking about that was released recently it actually let me look at just the bjb because it's so long that so what he's done is just taken and see that it's almost like a graphic novel scrolling through this an this was released just a couple months ago and it blows my mind all that's being done here in in this canvas and going so long he's adapted this storytelling to match with the limitations of the narrow but long canvas just keep telling actually did two got this thing keep going and it just keeps on going

it's a whole you can go to the site and leave the whole thing but it's pretty impressive um I also was going to

show just ruin the in so this is an animation by jet who was kind of the most wellknown pancy artist or sorry an an artist in the scene um and if we let this whole thing run I just if anybody wants to see anything else or talk about anything else this this runs about 4 minutes if you let the whole thing go so we just let it go in the background but um so I was talking about the way it's it's drawn um you see it's just what he's really doing here is just like when the eyes blink he's drawing characters on it to kind of animate that process and you see the clear screen

featuring transitions uh the only editor I know that ever did animation was the draw I think that's one reason that animation kind of fell fell out once acid draw became the prominent an editor um artists just weren't interested in using the draw anymore because a a draw they also probably four other dos based ancy editors somewhere around there created by different people um empathy ITP draw a couple others I'm not thinking of there was also a viewer by almost every group had a viewer so you the way you could you could go scroll through a pack like we are here but in BS um almost every group wrot their own viewer so you didn't have to

worry about voting the right kind of drivers and stuff for the um it's just going to keep on going it's a nice little story about loyalty

and I don't know who's been drawing I I can't believe they did that much but there are also a dozen people in there um you can kind of see there how someone a lot of people have different techniques but so you see how he just he a lot of people like this inverse technique uh the screen starts black it's always has always start black traditionally a lot of ours will fill in with gray and then use black to draw the outline um one I think they just visualize it better sort of like pen pen on paper um but also ultimately those lines are probably going to be black in the end anyway and if you draw with the

gray you have to end up switching that you really kind of lose track of it um I think this is now the will be the third an my Cas in but uh and the second for Christian first one with his sh off um but see let me just give a call out who's in there avenging Angel Antichrist breakfast uh cat Hood Enzo Misfit retribution who so far has not drawn it's very good and uh the creek fever and un Angel was saying I bet there really is no presentation excuse to give this all together yeah I I thought about trying to just like turn Hangouts on or something for the audio to go to them

but I didn't want it to potentially screw everything up so they uh they'll just have to look at it after and find out I I can't um it's a lot of talented guys doing stuff with a medium that's so so limited that you know I'm kind of latched on as the archivist at this point I can't do what they do um Christian actually is similar he I think he drew one an ever and it wasn't really him it was somebody else I think it was a ghost riter um but um you know he h you know as acid and Ice did a lot for the scene there are also a lot of smaller groups that don't get credit

that did a lot for the scene um there was one kind of as the scene was dying called the legion that I really lacked on to that um kind of had a mission to to really make sure the scud diday alive but now in the 2000s with Facebook um Enzo has been kind of a driving force to keeping things alive there's a group called Latronics that's still releasing py to day and they do an amazing job it's all um Enzo's work getting all that together and then just The Talented guys that are doing the work it's you know I I kind of tell them all the time that I only I only have all this because of them it's it's not that

hard to just display images on the website um and they can do a little bit of Outreach like this still [Music] going it didn't start over did it no no I mean think about the time put in to do this animation it's unbelievable and he's really if you search anation on YouTube it's mostly Jed that comes up because he's just the [Music] foremost one thing about Jed ant naations is he would uh actually make them pronounce the vowels and the words yeah so a lot of his Antion if you look at the text that's being written and said he's he sounding the out he's not just flapping the G

right right when I showed this to a couple people I think brend or people um they kind of noted how it's they talk and then then the text comes up I don't know why that came about but if we saw that animation earlier also making fun of ice the same technique was used I don't really know why that was the technique that was used uh should have thought before he did that um I don't know why that was the technique it's just kind of what it came about again it's like that new school is just kind of what how things evolve that's how they did

animation this was for the dog society which was a huge we board right a lot of these boards overlap as we art boards so it can be hard to so that's a [Applause] dead thanks everybody tell them thanks Christian was great watch it's really funny like no you never showed me that animation before ever seen I think they just yeah this I threw that one in at the last minute when I realized that it was a good spot to put it in it's great but um