Kirkman14

ANSI art is a creative work like any other, and the U.S. automatically grants a copyright to "authors" (artists) of original works from the moment those works are "fixed." Registration is not necessary. See: https://www.copyright.gov/engage/visual-artists/

Fire Escape was famous in St. Louis, Missouri, for her meticulous work as curator of "Fire Escape's St. Louis BBS Directory," the authoritative monthly list of bulletin boards in the 314 area code. Even Boardwatch Magazine recognized Fire Escape's directory as "one of the most accurate and detailed bulletin board lists in the world."

And Fire Escape was one of many sysops around the world who often repurposed older so-called "public domain" ANSI art to enliven her bulletin board.

This blog post traces the origins of several welcome screens from Fire Escape's BBS, as well as alternate versions made by other people. It shows that adapting old ANSI art was a widespread practice on the BBS scene, and it wasn't limited to sysops or programmers -- even ANSI artists sometimes reused their own work.

These are definitely ANSI art. They use the unique PC extended character set (pipes, shaded blocks, etc), the classic PC CGA/EGA 16-color palette, and ANSI escape codes.

I don't think this term is exclusively American ... there were (and are) plenty of European and international ANSI artists. But I'm happy to be corrected.

I got into the distinction a little bit in Part 2 of this series: https://breakintochat.com/blog/2025/12/28/ansi-art-and-webco...

Most ANSI art is displayed on the web as PNG because it's lossless and can be indexed to the correct 16 colors. Lossy formats like JPG introduce weird artifacts that screw up the look.

So, for a blog post, PNG is the most robust way to display the art across browsers of all kind.

But you definitely can get the original ANSI files. Lokke packaged every 20 or so of his telecomics into "ALLMACKx.ZIP" archives for distribution. These were very similar to the artpacks that the underground ANSI art scene would eventually use. I uploaded the seven ALLMACK files I recovered and uploaded them to the 16colors ANSI art archive: https://16colo.rs/artist/don+lokke+jr

That's probably the best way (for now) to explore it as a collection or download the original files.

I do have some more Lokke telecomics I located that were not in ALLMACK archives, and so are not submitted to 16c yet. I may just package them up as a "MISC" pack and upload them.

At the height of the 1992 presidential election, Don Lokke Jr. began publishing ANSI art political cartoons.

He called his digital comic strips "telecomics," and he used them to channel the skepticism and anger felt by everyday Americans about broken political promises and the looming economic recession.

Lokke would draw nearly 300 telecomics by 1995 as part of his business syndicating and selling unique online content to the sysops of bulletin board systems.

By then the great migration from BBSes to the World Wide Web was well underway. Lokke jumped ship, too, and moved his businesses to the web. His ANSI telecomics were soon forgotten, and many of them were lost.

Decades later, I unearthed 145 of them.

This is my in-depth profile of Lokke's work. It's a unique look back in time.

Thanks so much, and I hope you enjoy the blog series. I'm still working on Part 4, but I'm very happy with how the first three turned out.

I don't know if you'd be willing, but I would greatly appreciate it if you would add some of these thoughts as a comment to Part 2 of the blog series!

Ah, now this is something that Part 2 of this series gets into -- how do you define a "comic"? (https://breakintochat.com/blog/2025/12/28/ansi-art-and-webco...)

Will Eisner and Scott McCloud say that what distinguishes comics from cartoons and other forms is that they are sequential. McCloud's definition specifically exclude single-panels like "The Far Side" or "The Family Circus". In his view they are cartoons, not comics.

However, other people have pushed back on this particular limitation of his definition.

There's an extended quote from Eerie at the end of this story where he addresses this (in the context of where/if ANSI comics fit into the history of webcomics).

Same here. I was an active BBSer as a teen throughout the 1990s, but was never part of the underground artscene.

The 2006 book "A History of Webcomics" asserted that "Inspector Dangerfuck" -- created by ANSI artist Eerie -- was "the first known comic on the Internet."

The book offered no dates, no details, and no sources. But these red flags didn't deter later editors, bloggers, and content creators from repeating versions of this statement.

To be clear, the assertion was wrong. Eerie drew "Inspector Dangerfuck" pieces in 1994, and there had been much earlier online comics.

Still, the assertion raises a lot of interesting questions: What is ANSI art? Who was Eerie? What was "Inspector Dangerfuck?" Was it even a comic? Were there other ANSI art comics?

I've written a multi-part series tackling these questions and diving deep into the history of an often-overlooked subculture.

You're very welcome! I've been studying his work for many years. It may not have succeeded financially, but you have to admire his passion in each of his projects.

Yes, the Music Creator has been very tricky to run in emulation on my Mac. Originally, I could not get the installer to work in DOSBox, but it did work in QEMU.

After installing the TMC software to a hard disk image, it ran for me in both emulators. However, it wouldn't play music in QEMU -- though the same hard drive image will play music for me in DOSBox!

So, yes, it works for me locally in DOSBox. But for reasons I don't understand, the music does not play in the Internet Archive’s version of DOSBox.

The original installer files can be downloaded here: https://breakintochat.com/blog/2022/11/29/unearthed-kirschen...

Jewish cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen died on April 14 at the age of 87, and he is (rightly) being celebrated for “Dry Bones,” his great life’s work. But I would like to highlight his lesser-known legacy: as a tech innovator who tried to bring humor and humanity to the cold silicon world of computers in the 1980s.

Last fall, Josh Renaud gave a presentation to the Atlanta Historical Computing Society about rescuing and researching cartoonist Ya'akov Kirschen's unique computer games and software.

In the 1980s, Kirschen managed to get splashy publicity for several of his projects, but none of it was commercially successful, and after several decades it was mostly forgotten and lost.

This AHCS talk gets into Kirschen's history, the making of the games, and highlights some unique Atlanta connections to the games.

To learn more about Kirschen, or download the software, visit Break Into Chat:

https://breakintochat.com/blog/category/kirschen/?order=asc

How do you raise awareness of a cool but obscure graphics format used by BBSes on an overlooked computer platform in the late 1980s and early 1990s?

Well, you could start by writing a six-part, 14,000-word in-depth history of it.

https://breakintochat.com/blog/category/instant-graphics-and...

Then maybe you could recruit some artists and retrocomputing enthusiasts to help make an artpack full of new images and new animations showing it off!

https://mistigris.org/packs/IGNITE01.ZIP

That's basically what I did!

I assembled IGNITE 01, a new artpack released by Mistigris computer arts and Break Into Chat, featuring 18 images and animations created in "Instant Graphics and Sound" (IGS) format for the Atari ST.

IGS was obscure even its heyday. Like RIPscrip, it's a plain-text protocol for encoding graphics, sound effects, and music. But it predates RIP by several years, since it was created specifically for the Atari ST, it has constraints unique to that platform and different from the PC.

I hope my history series and artpack might elevate the profile of IGS, and maybe interest a few more people to try making stuff with it.

If you're not into downloading and unzipping artpacks, etc, you can also experience IGNITE on YouTube with this nine-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS_riObN32o

* Download pack ZIP: https://mistigris.org/packs/IGNITE01.ZIP

* Watch pack as a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS_riObN32o

* Read deep-dive series on history of IGS: https://breakintochat.com/blog/category/instant-graphics-and...

How do you spread the word about an obscure Atari ST graphics format from the BBSing days?

Recruit some folks to help you make an artpack full of images and animations showing it off!

That's the idea behind IGNITE, an artpack from Mistigris and Break Into Chat with 18 images and animations in "Instant Graphics and Sound" format.

IGS was a graphics protocol for BBSes on the often-overlooked Atari ST computer platform. It was similar to RIPscrip, but predated it by several years, and included commands for looping, music, and animation.

This is the second part of a new multi-part deep dive into "Instant Graphics and Sound." IGS was a plain-text protocol for displaying vector graphics, animation, music and sound on Atari ST BBSes, which debuted in 1988.

This part profiles IGS creator Larry Mears.

A self-described “working man without a degree,” Mears was a shipping clerk for a local bakery, who often downplayed his own coding ability. “I am not an advanced-level programmer,” he once wrote.

Still, he enjoyed programming because it exercised his mind.

“My job takes care of the old back,” he joked.

Developed in 1986, "Magic Harp" was an early attempt at AI-like autonomous music generation. Israeli cartoonist Ya'akov Kirschen's idea was to extract three sorts of "musical DNA" from existing works, then recombine them to create new variations. His technology was used to help score a BBS TV documentary, and was covered by the New York Times and other major newspapers. The early Amiga versions of the software were never published, until they were recovered by the website breakintochat.com in 2024.

Ever wonder what the Jewish version of Pac-Man might look like?

In the early 1980s, the Gesher organization in Israel began developing educational software for Jewish students. They recruited Jerusalem Post cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen, who worked with them on four games for the Apple II: "Aleph Baiters," "Nosh Kosh," "Borders," and "The Georgia Variations."

These games were shown at conferences and profiled in newspapers and magazines. But Gesher didn't really know how to sell software. The games received little distribution and were lost to time.

... Until a few weeks ago when I published them on my website "Break Into Chat". I also recovered several other collections of software created by Kirschen (plus the histories behind them) for the Atari ST, Amiga, and IBM PC.

Before we had Rotten Tomatoes, before we even had the web, a group of diehard Star Trek TNG fans in Usenet's rec.arts.startrek.* newsgroups began submitting weekly episode ratings to Joe Reiss, who would collect them and share the results. The S.O.S. grew in popularity over the years, reaching its peak during the DS9/VOY years. Reiss ultimately collected nearly 300,000 individual submissions.

I've been trying Whisper on my old setup (Mac Pro 2012 running Mojave, with Radeon RX 580), and it's a pretty amazing tool.

Unfortunately my system is not ideal for today's AI tools. Whisper runs only on the CPU, and it's slow.

I know PyTorch recently added Metal support, but only for M-based Macs. Has anyone found a way to make it work with Intel Macs?

Thanks for posting this. I'm the guy who did the interview. It took over a year, but I'm happy with how it came out. Hopefully it whets people's appetites to telnet to a BBS and play some TradeWars 2002!

I've been wanting to interview Radoff for years. "Space Empire Elite" was the first BBS door game I ever played, back in the early 1990s.

He sees BBS door games as precursors to the "social games" of today, and I totally agree.

There's a wiki dedicated to them (http://breakintochat.com) and a blog with interviews with door game authors (http://breakintochat.com/blog).

People are still WRITING doors, too. Musician Shooter Jennings of all people released a door game recently, and he offered a Bitcoin prize to people playing it. (http://breakintochat.com/blog/2015/09/18/shooter-jennings-cr...)

There's an active mini community of folks writing new Javascript doors for Synchronet BBS software (http://synchro.net). These are still ANSI games but they are more action-oriented.

So yeah, not entirely forgotten.

The entire model was totally different. Door games were usually shareware. Authors wanted sysops to pay a registration fee, and they used different tactics to encourage that. Sometimes the game had extra features crippled unless you registered; sometimes there was a time limit after which the game would be unplayable if you didn't register. But note that the registrations were paid by SYSOPS rather than the individual end users. (Though sometimes users on a BBS would chip in together to help their sysop register a favorite game)

Thanks for posting that link to my interview. Austin Seraphin now does a lot of work on software accessibility.

Great reminiscence, though I wish he talked a bit more about BBS door games (http://breakintochat.com/wiki/BBS_door_game). They always get short shrift in my opinion.

Anybody have fond memories of playing BBS door games? I'd love to hear about 'em.