I was sorting some old zip archives on my file server when I stumbled across an old text file from October 1997 with the name “INETSUXX.ZIP”. I was intrigued and checked it out. The FILE_ID.DIZ provided already a glimpse of the things to come. .—————————–.| a short statement about the || actual bulletin board || system scene !!! || changes are needed! |`——————————- — – | COMMENT ON THIS FILE!??! : ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ . _.:%[READ:IT]%:._ Here is the entire content of the included text file with the filename “CHANGE.IT!”. It has two authors. The initial author who also created the ZIP file and started spreading it through other bulletin board systems is an anonymous sysop who is mad that the BBS scene was going down the drain and that everybody was switching to use the Internet rather than dialing a BBS. It was modified and extended with comments by PigPen of Poison and Surge. He made some were good and forward thinking statements back then, even though his English language skills are not the best (the text screams for spelling and grammatical errors) and border-line PG13 language used. This is true for both guys by the way. I think it was how we really talked back then. I can’t remember for sure, but the text refreshed some long forgotten memories in me.Okay, here it comes, uncut and uncensored. Original text…. this sux! we had several times to change the whole thing… but no one of us seems to care about the[…]
As the title of this post already said, it was time again for a clean-up of my site RoySAC.com. Its content was growing significantely over the past months, which resulted in a very user unfriendly navigation and gave folks a hard time to find stuff on the site.HomepageThe first thing you will notice is a much more cleaner, shorter and straight forward homepage of RoySAC.com. Old content from the homepage was moved to existing pages (SAC homepage, About Me page), to its own page (Closed Society BBS) or simply deleted.ASCII Art AcademyThe ASCII art primer and the three styles of the underground text art scene articles can not be found in the top navigation anymore. I created a whole new section call the ASCII Art Academy. The academy refers to those two articles and to a lot more stuff, including the existing ASCII art tutorials by Solid and DiamonDie plus five new ASCII art tutorials and the History of ASCII Art article by Joan G. Stark.The new ASCII Art Academy can also be reached via the simple URL RoySAC.com/learn/.Art GalleriesI had already four art galleries for my own stuff. Three more were added when my site took over as Superior Art Creations homepage. Then I added two more with ASCII and ANSI art from other artists and don’t forget the special ASCII Nudes gallery and the ASCII morph pieces by Skylined. Stuff was all over the place. The galleries got a new “splash page” called… right, Art Galleries, which provides[…]
I added a new page to my site, which is dedicated to show videos that are about or related to text art and the subject that surrounds it, including the BBS scene, the demoscene and of course SAC, Superior Art Creations.Visit the new ASCII Art Videos Section at RoySAC.com/videos/.The section launched with 10 videos. The first one is “The Art of Textmode” – Text Art History, a presentation at the Assembly 2004 Demo party in Helsinki, Finland by Christian Wirth aka RaD Man. I referred to that video earlier already in a blog post of mine from February and decided to put it somewhere on the site where it can be found more easily.The second one is a short video by Creature of Hell/SAC – The Movie from 2001, showing off some of his pixel art skills. The main part of the section is made up by the six videos, which represent the complete content of Jason Scott’s 3 DVD long documentary titled “BBS – The Documentary”. No, it’s not an illegal copy of the DVD’s. Jason put them up himself on Google Video, because he released the documentary under the creative commons licensing model to make its content easier accessible. Jason does of course appreciate support for his cause(s), which are surrounding the subject of BBS and actually were the triggers for him to create the documentary in the first place. You can support him via buying the real DVDs, pressed, not burned, with nice wrapping and paper box[…]
Something else was even longer on my to-do list than the post about leveraging sites like deviantART for online marketing. It has been on my list for over one year now and I also got finally around to do it. What am I talking about? The article to the PCBoard BBS Software at Wikipedia. I extended the article significantly and also added a photo of the box of the software, which I took myself with my digital camera. You can see the picture here in the post as well. For the folks who don’t know, I used to run a BBS myself called “Closed Society”. I wrote about it on the homepage of my RoySAC.com website. I used as BBS Software PCBoard. First via multiple PC’s under MS DOS and then all Notes on one machine running under IBM OS/2 Warp. The BBS was up 24/7 for over 2 years in my one bedroom studio. Did the noise of the running computers bother me when I was asleep? Actually quite the opposite. I had a problem sleeping when the BBS was shut down and offline. PCBoard was a great software and the best thing about it was the availability of its own script language to change the look, feel and behavior of the BBS. I wrote and published a bunch of tools myself. You can download all of them here. I launched the BBS shorty after SAC was founded. The existence of the BBS did cause me to create more[…]
Except for some activities at deviantART was I not successful after over one year of searching to find much (if any) other blogs that are related to the old ANSI and ASCII underground artscene. Fellow artists who created ASCII art for group NFO files, File_ID.diz or ANSI art for BBS Layouts and Login pictures and logos back in the early to mid 1990’s. It’s sad and frustrating. The lack of community makes me spin off with my blog into other subjects, such as deviantART, Wikipedia and Cirque Du Soleil (or Internet Marketing and in a few cases about video games). I also was writing about internet video and music. Nice stuff, but not text art related. I recenty created a new “Demoscene and Text Art Community” over at BUMPzee! BUMPzee! is a blogger community / feed reader / networking site with some Digg features. I added another blog to the community, which I found at Blogspot, but that blog does not see much activity anymore either. Where are you guys (and few girls) of the text art scene, demo scene and BBS warez scene? Nobody blogging? Nobody writing about things that were forgotten by most people and never learned by todays youth? Come on over and contact me and join the community. Cheers!Carsten aka Roy/SAC