🎁 HOLiDAY SPECiAL 🎄 From ANSi to nerd fonts…
… and some other stuff to get you feeling nostalgic
And now for something completely different
I received quite some feedback on one of my more recent articles here on Medium. Not only did the community initiated pull request on my Github repository to improve the content inside, I also got quite a few questions about the "ASCII art" that I used and how I made it.
This happens to be a topic I'm very passionate about! (This has probably something to do with my age and my experiences with computers during the 80’s and 90’s 😎) So, I thought it would be a fun diversion to deviate from Microsoft Sentinel, and other products from the Microsoft security stack for a bit.
Please, hop on a time machine with me and let's have a little trip down memory lane…
ASCII/ANSi?
Many might have heard of terms like 'ASCII art' or 'ANSi art'. But before we dig into details, let's take a closer look at how computers screens in the early 80’s were displaying text and images.
It might now be hard to imagine, but there was a time where we had to do without any real Graphical User Interface (GUI). Before the Macintosh, Amiga Workbench, Atari's GEM and (arguably) Windows were available, computers screens were mostly limited by 'text mode' only.
In text mode the display is divided into 25 rows and 80 columns in order to display text without images. And each box can contain one character. Text mode is also known as character mode or alphanumeric mode.
Early 60’s telegraph code was used as a basis for what later became the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character encoding standard. Because of technical limitations of computer systems at the time, it provided only 7-bits (128 characters) of which only 95 were printable characters.
Some of the control characters, mainly used for printers in mind, are still used until this very day. Like the carriage return
\rand line feed\nsymbols.
Code page 437
When IBM shipped its first "Personal Computer" in 1981 it came standard with a character set 'code page 437' also known as CP437, OEM-US, OEM 437, PC-8, or DOS Latin US. This 9x14 pixels-per-character font was stored in the ROM of the monochrome display adapter.
The set includes all printable ASCII characters as well as some accented letters, Greek letters, icons, and line-drawing symbols. It is sometimes referred to as the “OEM font”, “high ASCII” or “extended ASCII”.
This character set remains the primary set in the core of any EGA and VGA-compatible graphics card. As such, text shown when a PC reboots (before fonts can be loaded and rendered) is typically rendered using this character set.
The example above also shows rectangular and square block in four different shades. When the Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) was released these could be combined with 16 colors. This became the bases of "ANSi art" as we know it today.
Technically ASCII art refers to artwork that consist of only the 95 printable characters of the original ASCII chart. Where ANSi art refers to artwork created with all of the 223 characters available in the "extended ASCII" version. ANSi art also contains special ANSi escape sequences that color text with the 16 foreground and 8 background colors. On an MS-DOS device this was offered by ANSI.SYS, a device driver loosely based upon the ANSI X3.64 standard which was added as a line in the
CONFIG.SYSin DOS.
DEVICE=C:\DOS\ANSI.SYS
Early GUI's
This extended list of characters provided a way to create early GUI's:
And this approach is still be visible today on modern systems:
BBS
What kickstarted the whole "ANSi" scene was the rise of BBSes. A Bulletin Board Service is a computer running software to which users could connect directly over their telephone lines.
Once logged in, the user could perform functions such as downloading/uploading software, reading news, posting bulletins and exchanging messages with other users through public message boards. In the early 1980s, message networks such as FidoNet were developed to provide services such as NetMail, which is similar to internet-based e-mail we use today. BBSes with multiple phone lines often provided chat rooms.
Bulletin Board Systems were in many ways a precursor to the modern-day Internet and social networks. Low-cost, high-performance modems drove the use of BBSes through the early 1990s.
Phone bill
My earliest memory of using a BBS myself, is after I got stuck during playing one of my favorite adventure games at the time by Sierra On-line.
These games were brutal by todays standards! because you could have missed picking up a very important item earlier in the game, which you needed later on. That's why you had to create lots of saved games so that you were able to backtrack to earlier states of your playthrough.
Sierra On-line advertised their BBS on the retail boxes and inside game manuals. (which were sometimes carefully copied from the original 🏴☠️) These would provide hints and solutions for the many challenges you had to overcome playing their games.
I figured out that by pulling the telephone line from the fax machine next to the computer, and sticking it into the modem, I could connect to the BBS without our home phone calls being interrupted in any way. 😇
Little did I know that I was making expensive long distance international phone calls, which caused very unusual bills for a fax machine… 🙄
Everybody who remembers the dial-up period knows how frustrating it was when somebody else in the house started using the phone in the middle of a download you were waiting for to complete for over 20 minutes.
“MOOOOM, DON’T PICK UP THE PHONE!”
Release groups and demo scene
The rise of the ANSi scene came most directly by the underground already in place which was illegally pirating software, most commonly known as warez.
Kids in the 80s had a bigger apetite for playing video games than their budgets would allow. So they started sharing games with each other. Software developers noticed this and tried implementing all kinds of copy protection to prevent this. Hackers became familiar with the programming languages used by the developers and found elaborate ways to work around them and released 'cracked' games. Sometimes even before these games hit the store shelves (0-day warez).
Pirate groups were formed all over the world and a massive rivalry started which group could get their hands on new games, and crack the copy protection first. They applied their signatures to these games in the form of opening screens with artwork, or later more elaborate animations with sounds and music, to brag about their accomplishments. These intros are also known as a "cracktro".
This groups of hackers and crackers called themselves "elite" (
3l33tor1337) and started applying different spelling in their language, known as "leetspeak". Some words (i.e. n00b or pwnd) are still found in common Internet usage.
Fighting for (floppy) space
Quickly the artists discovered ways to scroll their art across the screen to expand their 80x25 canvas limitations. And by adding music (mostly in a MOD format) these intros quickly became larger and larger.
A one megabyte file was still very large to transfer over a phone line, and a high-density floppy disk could only store 1,44 megabytes of data. That's why some release groups started to release their artwork without any game at all. This became known as a 'demo' and the 'demo scene' started.
The Art of Warez
If you want to learn more about the rise (and fall) of ANSi and the demo scene, I would highly suggest watching the (30 min.) documentary "Safe Crackers : The Art of Warez" on YouTube.
A combination of techniques and the full embrace of the low resolution colored block, as a possibility for abstraction and expression rather than simply a limitation of illustrative realism, led to aesthetics which would have not been seen before in other art forms.
— Kevin Bouton-Scott, The Art of Warez
Demo parties
All over the world large LAN parties were organized and the biger ones also had a specific focus on the demo scene. Demo groups or individual artist were painfully crafting their newest artworks during the weekend, one character at a time…
During the weekend there were usually several moments for visitors to vote their pick in several different categories.
I was visiting "Takeover" in 2001 where there were still large groups op people bringing their Amiga's and musical instruments to compete into several of the artist competitions.
These weekends generally started on Fridays and continued non-stop until Sunday. I was surviving on pizza, soda, the adrenaline of playing multiplayer Quake and a few hours of sleep next to my desktop (full tower!) or in the car on the parking lot. Aaah,… those were the days…. 😊
I can remember clearly that some of these demos were truly amazing to watch! Especially in the 90s when graphics cards weren't powerful enough to render 3D in real-time. Some of the demos seemed to create animations impossible to run on current hardware. And the filesizes were tiny!
View and create ANSi art
During the 90s several tools arose with which manipulating ASCII characters and colors was made much easier. With hotkeys for frequently used actions and mouse support for moving, copying and pasting sections of characters. Release group ACiD released their own tool called ACiDDraw and it can still be downloaded of their website.
With today's hardware you'll need to resort to DOSbox for running these pieces of software or use a more modern application like PabloDraw or Moebius.
Uses in the modern day
Modern operating systems have access to a more elaborate text encoding standard named Unicode. As of the current version (15.0) it consists of almost 150.000 characters covering 161 modern and historic scripts (i.e. Arabic and Egyptian hieroglyphs) as well as lots of symbols and emoji’s.
The Unicode standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organization which includes most of the main computer companies with any interest in text-processing standards. Including Adobe, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP.
Although ANSi and BBSes were both rendered obsolete by the rise of the Internet, and increased speed capacities of our digital connections, there are still people out there keeping this art form alive until this very day!
Internet-based BBS
A couple of modern BBSes can be accessed with a telnet client over the Internet. Most require some specific terminal settings (such as line spacing) for optimal results of the artworks. Some of them will also have the ability to visit the BBS from a web browser or a dedicated telnet client with RIP.
RIP
No, not rest in piece but Remote Imaging Protocol. It's a technology which was new to me, but I encountered during the research for this article.
With RIP more sophisticated vector graphics can be used over low-bandwidth links. Apparently this isn't something new since it's been around since 1992. Also RIP-capable clients and servers provide the option to use graphical menus which can be controlled by mouse input.
Upon logging into the ACiD underworld I was greeted by "Hawk Hubbard" via a private chat to my great surprise! He appeared to be the operator keeping the BBS online!
New ANSI packs
I was also surprised to learn that new ANSi packs are still released until this very day. Websites like Sixteen Colors and Bricktronics provide galleries of old and new works of art.
Star Wars in ASCII
Fun fact! You can watch the entire first Star Wars movie "A New Hope" in ASCII!
This project started in 1997 and is still online until this very day! You can watch it by connecting with telnet or in your webbrowser.
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nlIf you're interested in more background information, also check out their FAQ section.
Back to the future!
Yes, back in 2022 again ready to close the year and start off with a new one.
I promised in my title and introduction to elaborate a bit on how you can take some of that 80s and 90s ANSi nostalgia, and apply it into your daily work today. Well, here are a couple of tips.
Generate ASCII/ANSI yourself
It's obviously not possible to just easily generate some full-screen artwork, but there are some options to create some nice looking logo's for example.
With FIGlet you can provide a string (and optionally a font) and it will output a logo with ASCII characters. These can be copy/pasted or stored in a file to display. For example when you run a script or login to a shell.
FIGlet is available since 1991 and can still be downloaded and used on several different operating systems. There's also an option to download and install additional "fonts".
If you want to try it out the easiest way is to visit this website.
Type in a string and click on the "test all" button.
FIGlet will only output plain ASCII, without any ANSi control characters to display colors for example. But with the help of lolcat (an utility for Linux, BSD and OSX) you can add some color! 🎨
Lolcat concatenates similarly to the cat command and adds rainbow coloring to it. 🌈 You can simply add | lolcat to anything to colorize it!
And this in turn can be combined with FIGlet to create colorized logo's!
And the nice thing is, is that the color information can be saved as ANSi into a text file for later use.
figlet "I love rainbows" | lolcat -f -p 1.5 >> ~/rainbow.ans
You can combine this for example with other tools like NeoFetch to create some nice looking login screens for example. 😎
If you want to see how this was made, and try it out yourself, check out my Github repository and download and run ascii-header-install.sh.
Get your (Power)Shell "poshed" up
That's all fun and all when you're running Linux, but Windows users: I've got something for you as well.
Install Oh My Posh
PowerShell users really need to look into installing oh-my-posh. It not only looks nicer than your default shell, it's also useful by displaying statues about the things you're currently working on.
There a loads of themes available, so choose whatever you like most. After installation you need to add it to your profile so that it always runs upon opening:
code $profile
Nerd fonts?
And lastly I'd like to point out "nerd fonts". (yes, that's really how they're supposed to be called) These fonts are a collection of modified fonts aimed at developers. They're "monospaced", which means that the spacing of characters is always the same for every character so that they line up nicely. Most fonts are extended by adding extra 'glyphs' and 'ligatures'.
These 'glyphs' are the little icons you'll see in a lot of oh-my-posh theme examples. And 'ligatures' are multiple characted placed against each other to form different shapes or symbols. A fine example of a font with nice 'ligatures' is FireCode, which I used as default in VScode.
According to the FireCode devs:
Programmers use a lot of symbols, often encoded with several characters. For the human brain, sequences like
->,<=or:=are single logical tokens, even if they take two or three characters on the screen. Your eye spends a non-zero amount of energy to scan, parse and join multiple characters into a single logical one. Ideally, all programming languages should be designed with full-fledged Unicode symbols for operators, but that’s not the case yet.Fira Code is a free monospaced font containing ligatures for common programming multi-character combinations. This is just a font rendering feature: underlying code remains ASCII-compatible. This helps to read and understand code faster. For some frequent sequences like
..or//, ligatures allow us to correct spacing.
The end of the line — thank you!
I hope this article was an entertaining distraction to read. Hopefully it brought back some good memories for you as it did for me while researching for it. Please let me know if there were memories that popped up which I didn't mention here. It’s always fun to geek out on this stuff with other likely minded people!
Thanks for reading my articles in 2022 and also many thanks for contributing on Github and leaving responses, claps and questions for me to answer here on Medium!
I'll be back in 2023 with new content regarding Microsoft Sentinel and other (Microsoft) security products, as well as Microsoft Azure in general and other security related tips and tricks.
Enjoy your holidays and best whishes for 2023! 🥂
— Koos
Links
- Watch the documentary "Safe Crackers: The Art of Warez" on YouTube!
- Sixteen Colors is an online archive for ANSI and ASCII art packs.
- Blocktronics is an international network of digital text-mode artists that releases ANSi art packs periodically.
- Moebius is a modern dag ANSI viewer/editor available for all platforms.
- PabloDraw is another modern day ANSI viewer/editor and links directly to the ‘sixteen colors’ to view their complete gallery
- The ACiD website is still up! Albeit in a former version than the one they disbanded on.
- My personal Github repository, providing instructions and a bash script to create a nice linux login screen.
