ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters. The term is also loosely used to refer to text-based visual art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font such as Courier for presentation.
A bulletin board system (BBS), also called a computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user performs functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through public message boards and sometimes via direct chatting. In the early 1980s, message networks such as FidoNet were developed to provide services such as NetMail, which is similar to internet-based email.
In computer science, an escape sequence is a combination of characters that has a meaning other than the literal characters contained therein; it is marked by one or more preceding characters.
ANSI escape sequences are a standard for in-band signaling to control cursor location, color, font styling, and other options on video text terminals and terminal emulators. Certain sequences of bytes, most starting with an ASCII escape character and a bracket character, are embedded into text. The terminal interprets these sequences as commands, rather than text to display verbatim.
Windows Notepad is a simple text editor for Windows; it creates and edits plain text documents. It was first released in 1983 to commercialize the computer mouse in MS-DOS.
A text file is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a computer file system.
A newline is a control character or sequence of control characters in character encoding specifications such as ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, etc. This character, or a sequence of characters, is used to signify the end of a line of text and the start of a new one.
The computer art scene, or simply artscene, is the community interested and active in the creation of computer-based artwork.
Microsoft Paint is a simple raster graphics editor that has been included with all versions of Microsoft Windows. The program opens, modifies and saves image files in Windows bitmap (BMP), JPEG, GIF, PNG, and single-page TIFF formats. The program can be in color mode or two-color black-and-white, but there is no grayscale mode. For its simplicity and wide availability, it rapidly became one of the most used Windows applications, introducing many to painting on a computer for the first time.
.nfo is a filename extension for text files that accompany warez scene releases of pirated software or media.
ACiD Productions (ACiD) is a digital art group. Founded in 1990, the group originally specialized in ANSI artwork for bulletin board systems (BBS). More recently, they have extended their reach into other graphical media and computer software development. During the BBS-era, their biggest competitor was iCE Advertisements.
FILE_ID.DIZ is a plain-text file containing a brief description of the content of the archive to which it belongs. Such files were originally used in archives distributed through bulletin board systems (BBSes) and is still used in the warez scene. FILE_ID stands for "file identification". DIZ stands for "description in zipfile".
ANSI art is a computer art form that was widely used at one time on bulletin board systems. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols — all codes found in IBM code page 437, often referred to as extended ASCII and used in MS-DOS and Unix environments. ANSI art also contains special ANSI escape sequences that color text with the 16 foreground and 8 background colours offered by ANSI.SYS, an MS-DOS device driver loosely based upon the ANSI X3.64 standard for text terminals. Some ANSI artists take advantage of the cursor control sequences within ANSI X3.64 in order to create animations, commonly referred to as ANSImations. ANSI art and text files which incorporate ANSI codes carry the de facto.ANS file extension.
The Remote Imaging Protocol and its associated Remote Imaging Protocol Script language, RIPscrip, is a graphics language that provides a system for sending vector graphics over low-bandwidth links, notably modems. It was originally created by Jeff Reeder, Jim Bergman, and Mark Hayton of TeleGrafix Communications in Huntington Beach, California to enhance bulletin board systems and other applications.
Synchronet is a multiplatform BBS software package, with current ports for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and BSD variants. Past versions also ran on MS-DOS and OS/2, but support for those platforms were dropped in version 3.0.
ANSI.SYS is a device driver in the DOS family of operating systems that provides extra console functions through ANSI escape sequences. It is partially based upon a subset of the text terminal control standard proposed by the ANSI X3L2 Technical Committee on Codes and Character Sets.
Mystic BBS is a bulletin board system software program that began in 1995 and was first released to the public in December 1997 for MS-DOS. It has been ported to Microsoft Windows, OS/2, OS X, and Linux. Mystic was designed to be a spiritual successor to the Renegade (BBS) and Telegard bulletin board systems.
Chasys Draw IES is a suite of applications including a layer-based raster graphics editor with adjustment layers, linked layers, timeline and frame-based animation, icon editing, image stacking and comprehensive plug-in support, a fast multi-threaded image file converter and a fast image viewer, with RAW image support in all components. It supports the native file formats of several competitors including Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Corel Photo-Paint, GIMP, Krita, Paint.NET and PaintShop Pro, and the whole suite is designed to make effective use of multi-core processors, touch-screens and pen-input devices.
The IBM Personal Computer Basic, commonly shortened to IBM BASIC, is a programming language first released by IBM with the IBM Personal Computer, Model 5150 in 1981. IBM released four different versions of the Microsoft BASIC interpreter, licensed from Microsoft for the PC and PCjr. They are known as Cassette BASIC, Disk BASIC, Advanced BASIC (BASICA), and Cartridge BASIC. Versions of Disk BASIC and Advanced BASIC were included with IBM PC DOS up to PC DOS 4. In addition to the features of an ANSI standard BASIC, the IBM versions offered support for the graphics and sound hardware of the IBM PC line. Source code could be entered with a full-screen editor, and limited facilities were provided for rudimentary program debugging. IBM also released a version of the Microsoft BASIC compiler for the PC concurrently with the release of PC DOS 1.10 in 1982.
