New iCE Web Site 86
Slothy writes "The old ansi group (and modern art group of all media formats), iCE (Insane Creators Enterprise), has unveiled our new web site. The new site allows you to search through all the art we've released since 1992, and it's viewable online. And for the icing on the cake, we're giving away some free (libre) software to go with the free (beer) art. Our code to convert ANSIs to hi-resolution images is released under the GPL. Drop by and find some old ansis you may have loved or see some modern work that's truly eye-popping. " Rob and I were talking with one of these boys at LinuxExpo and thinking about the BBS days of yore. This is making me so nostalgic, I might cry.
Re:this is all good but... (Score:1)
Pixel is doing tv video editing in Finland, last I heard.
PSI and someone else (Trug maybe?) have been working as the "Bitboys Oy" (www.bitboys.fi) designing a 3d chip called the "Glaze3D".
I actually don't know what became of Purple Motion, but Skaven went back to doing graphics of some sort.
That's the best I can do
Jon/Slothy
Re:Ahh... memories (Score:1)
Jon/Slothy
Re:this is all good but... (Score:1)
If anyone has some info on them...
At least ascii loaded even faster than shockwave (Score:1)
Re:Is it just me, or... (Score:1)
quartz.rutgers.edu (Score:1)
Is it just me, or... (Score:2)
ANSI Graphics (Score:1)
Then came the time when my brother and I started our OWN Commodore BBS. Ah, the nostalgia. DMBBS Baybee!
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
Re:ANSI art (Score:1)
This is ascii, right? (Score:1)
just curious
Re:BBS'S ARE ALIVE AND WELL!! (Score:1)
Re:Does anyone remember... (Score:1)
Re:Brings a tear to my eye. (Score:2)
How about a conferencing system? (I always viewed a BBS as a conferencing system wannabe
Way back in the Dark Ages (mid 80s) I wrote the Unix-based CoSy system that (among other things) serves as the basis for BIX (Byte Information Exchange), (also NIX in Japan and CIX in the UK).
A while back I started in on a Java version of CoSy (with some added features I've been wanting to do), and its largely complete but has been on the back burner for a while now.
However, some Bixen recently have expressed some interest in it, and there seems to be some interest here, so I'll put the stuff up on my web page [xoom.com] as soon as I get a chance (I need to check the files and add appropriate copyright/GPL notices, etc. Maybe (maybe) over the weekend.
(I'd love to be able to release the C source for the original CoSy but I don't have the rights. It was originally developed at U. of Guelph and the rights later sold to some Vancouver-based company who don't seem to have done anything with it in the last few years. The Web eclipsed it to a degree.)
And there are other ANSI/ASCII related sites (Score:1)
http://acheron.org
http://hirez.org
http://acid.org - yes ACiD still lives =)
AND, if you frequent EFNet on IRC, try joining
#ice,#acid,#ans,#ansi,#ascii
there are others, forgive me if I dont remember them all =)
Re:Ahh... memories (Score:1)
shrug... I even still use my old handle to this day.
I'll have to get back on IRC someday I guess...
Killean the Red - Free Beer BBS - TRiBE!!! (chuckle)
Nostalgia certainly is the key word here.
Re:ANSI art (Score:1)
Why would you use iDraw instead of TheDraw?
I don't even want to get into the list of feature differences that, if you were so inclined to draw a little ansi, makes iDraw superior, but I will post the partial feature list on idraw.ice.org right now.
http://idraw.ice.org [ice.org].
-brian aka Mass Delusion, iCE Senior Staff
(massd@ice.org)
On the rebirth of bulliten boards (Score:1)
For one, WWIV is ***BACK IN DEVELOPMENT***
theyre working on a NATIVE LINUX VERSION. If you remember correctly to get the source you need only pay the registration fee, remember modding wwiv all to hell? well soon we'll be able to do it in linux! YES WAYNE BELL LIVES! http://www.wwiv.com/ . Allen Softwares come out with a proggie called NetModem which allows any bbs program that can use a fossil driver to allow people to telnet into it. So you can put your old bbs back on the net using this program. Unfortunetly the shareware only supports 1 node. Also the next version of wwiv due out this summer will have support for netmodem. http://www.mindspring.com/~daallen/ only one problem with netmodem is its kinda slow which is why native telnet supporting bbs programs are better. Numerous BBS softwares for download http://www.thedirectory.org/diamond/soft1.htm
Also it seems Falcon BBS http://www.falkenbbs.com/ is a popular bbs program for linux unfortunetly its not open source and the free version only supports four nodes. We definately need an open source bbs proggie if we want the bbs scene and sense of community back. The nice thing about the new internet bbses is that you dont have to deal with ratios as much anymore because bandwidth is more plentiful because youre not limited to 1 phone line, also i have a few questions myself, i used to notice electrical interference would drop my cps rate on bbses, now with the net measured in k i dont actually see a rate decrease but i know its still happening but i dont think people really think about that unless its severe. Windows has made us lazy. Also remember the transfer protocol HS/Link?? We'll do we have bidirectional capability over the net as modems in the past have or what? Im guessing we do.
Also ive put up a few nostalgic treats on my website:
TheDraw http://home.earthlink.net/~cthind/thedraw.rar
miniTelnet http://home.earthlink.net/~cthind/mt32.exe
minitelnet has ansi and zmodem capability and a dialing dir, its for ansi bbses on the net. I was reading about a study done and in it they discovered that scientists working together in groups of 5-10 produced more work than larger groups. This could be the reason why alot of work creating incredible software got done on bbses. Another thing about the bbs scene is i LOVED the intense technical knowledge. Feeling more nostalgic? Check out http://soylent.textfiles.com/ for old text files from the bbs days. There have been many attempts to bring back the bbs days like wildcat's web based bbses that use html and SUCK or ripscript graphics which were killed by the web quite swiftly but i think its finally coming back correctly in the form of modifying and porting old bbses to linux or dos and accessible to telnet. I hope ive done my best to satisfy your nostalgic apetite. But this isnt nostalgia we're talking about here, the bbs scene can and will be alive again SOON.
Brings a tear to my eye. (Score:1)
There are still people out there releasing ANSIs, MODs and assorted computer demos. Just check out www.scene.org or www.assembly.org for some examples.
Anyway, I think now I'll go write that Java BBS I always talked about coding but never bothered to. (Would there be a demand for this if I wrote it?)
Re:Is it just me, or... (Score:1)
* by drongo
Why is it that "elite" groups of modemmers, and "elite" pirate/ art groups always make the vowels in their names small, while the
rest of the alphabet is in capital letter? I have often asked myself this.. example..
MiST, ACiD, iCE
Some groups make all the vowels small, while some only make a few.. example..
STRiKE, RAiD, SUiCiDE
I find this phenomenon quite interesting..
Are these pirates and "artists" typing on broken keyboards? Is it some ploy to boost egos? "Ha ha I have small i's and you don't!"? What? What drives these people to neglect the rights of vowels?
I am going to start a group...
The International Vowel Liberation Front..
not [TiVLF]
but
[tIvlf]
Vowels have equal rights in this world just like everyone else..
So why push them down and make them small? What is the point?
Please, if you see this happening, inform the person.. that vowels too can be capitalized.
drongo
...from Kithe E-Mag Issue Three, December 1994
Re:Good Gravy! mmm... gravy. (Score:1)
I think slashdot needs the same sort of thing. A page dedicated to all those servers which have been crushed by the dreaded Slashdot Effect. And maybe an official "I've been slashdotted" gif to put on your page if you manage to recover afterwards.
But seriously, every time I've visited ice.org it's been abysmally slow. Probably not the best bandwidth for a group serving out large, high quality images.
One more thing: if any of you old-skool ANSI guru's still has PyroView hanging around, let me know. I heard it's still one of the best viewers around.
I am gonna cry... (Score:1)
ex-iCE member
AADA
Re:Is it just me, or... (Score:1)
So, in that case iMac is a nod to iCE.
Cool to you! (Score:1)
So, are we still the only Quake clan with a Slothy splash image on our page?
Norton
(And why aren't you at Kevin's, ya slacker?)
Does anyone remember... (Score:1)
Pretty cool.
Re:This is ascii, right? (Score:1)
Jon/Slothy
Oops (Score:2)
Re:Does anyone remember... (Score:1)
---
Spammed? Click here [sputum.com] for free slack on how to fight it!
Re:Ahh... memories (Score:1)
Yeah, it is amazing remember what you used to be involved in. Around '94, or so, I remember Midnight Sorrow (who can still be found on IRC), getting real deep into iCE, and of course CCi.
It has been a while, hasn't it?
Former Sysop - Mythical Productions
BBS'S ARE ALIVE AND WELL!! (Score:1)
If you don't believe me, check out this one [mt-kisco.ny.us]. There is still no place to meet a more "folksy" online crowd.
The pay-for-use BBS's turned into ISP's, and the corporate sites simply went onto the web. Fine. The ones that remain are the true BBS's, the hobbyist ones!
Modern BBS software is quite capable of being accessed simultaneously by dialup callers, telnet users, WWW users, and folks with BBS client software. Naturally, the BBS's which continue to thrive are the ones which are connected to the Internet, allowing a global audience to connect.
BBS's are not dead. The rules of the game have changed, but the World Wide Waste-o-time can never offer the level of interactivity that a BBS can.
Nostalgia (Score:1)
To think, I could have been part of an 'i' group (MiRAGE, who later merged with another big 'i' group) when DREAM merged with them... But I was in a little 'i' group, and I got kicked out. [mumbles about Shihear Kallizad]
Ah, the days of WWIV, and Telegard, and Renegade, and all those Vision clones.. [they really were neat looking]. I actually registerd WWIV. I actually remember my registration number. [rambling on].
Re:GIF/BMP => ANSI (Score:1)
But anyways, search around.. there were 2-3 DOS utilities available to do it. One was called ansirez, and one was just gif2ansi.exe
Re:ANSI / ASCII art (Score:1)
Re:Good God! (Score:1)
lemon:~$ uptime
2:15pm up 7 day(s), 22:32, 2 users, load average: 0.37 0.29 0.28
nice distributed model, database server is on its own box, web server is dedicated as well, yadda yadda...
1 minor faux pas, we're on a bad hub.
Farmy [iCE]
The good old days (Score:1)
Maybe this is off topic, but I wish I could thank all the unknown people out there who sparked my curiosity and took the time to answer my neophyte questions. It's a shame that the internet the way I remember it, a close knit community of the brightest minds out there, is but a thing of the past.
Long live telnet, archie and gopher!
Re:Does anyone remember... (Score:1)
Anyway I rant WWIV, and the entire BBS could be run off a 720k 5.25 floppy, thus freeing up precious harddrive space. I drew tons of ansi art, nothing that great though, had lots of really cool door games, my favourite being the one where you were placed at a shell prompt and had to try to hack into various government computers and such, and then there was that other one where you owned planets and produced grain and other things and could war with other users, but as the sysop you could of course cheat
Those were the good days, and WWIV was such a great program, sigh..... Hey if anyone on here remembers a BBS in Iowa called Tri-Force, that was mine !
Re:Ahh... memories (Score:1)
Pretty freakin awesome
A Different Era (Score:1)
The world of BBS's was essentially split into two factions: the legit, and the so called "warez" boards. Legit boards were characterized by massive shareware catalogs and intricate FidoNet message board link ups. Warez boards, on the other hand, were at their peak multiline behemoths with international couriers. In my opinion, though, the real life of any BBS, regardless of its legality, was rooted in the message boards & chat services. It was here that the power and raw fun of online communication was brilliantly self-evident. No Internet experience I've ever had has come close to the best and most engaging boards that I was once a part of. Slashdot comes close in terms of a sense of community, but it's not quite the same. With any luck, someone will come up with a way to bring the old passion and simplicity of bulletin board systems into the comparatively confused nature of Internet based messaging.
Ahh... memories (Score:1)
There were a few groups back then, ACiD, iCE, DARK, and GOTHIC (which merged with ACiD). I had the privledge of being part of all four.
The weirdest thing is, I still have friends that I made back then, friends I made over international conference calls, that a member managed to 'acquire.'.
I also remember the hostility I saw for refusing to use the pixel-by-pixel Deluxe Paint II... I was using Photoshop and Fractal Design Painter. Simpler days, for sure.
Anyway, I guess I could mention some of those great people I met back then, Elminster, Epitaph, Oxygene, Radman, Prison Breaker, Carnifex, 4th Disciple, the list goes on.
I ended up getting into Sheridan College's Animation Program on the strength of art I did with those groups.
(I left after a few months, but that's a different story
BBS'ing, was terrific. It was a tighter, sharing community; sure, we had private BBS's, phreaking, and silly Telegard/Renegade/PCBoard hackers, ansi rippers, and pizza delivery boys running Art Groups, but it was a fun time. Without the people I met there, I probably would never had seen a UNIX system, never seen the Internet when it was mostly FTP and IRC.... oh, and Netscape 1.0 was around the corner, but it's not like we had ISP providing PPP... for that matter, we didn't exactly have a lot of ISPs.
Thanks to iCE-guys for reminding me of all this great stuff,
The Artist Formerly Known as Crow
Display ANSI directly (Score:1)
Feeling Nostalgic? (Score:1)
Good God! (Score:1)
Re:This may get moderated, but... (Score:1)
Don't forget also that while anybody's dog can wander into a cafe now, click a mouse and send a piece of e-mail, this was back in the time of strictly command-line software where using a computer entailed actually needing a clue about what you were doing (time investment) for minimal rewards (naked lady ansimations, if you were lucky! woo doggie...) In my experience the only idlers with the time available to pick it up (not needing to enter into an early form of wage slavery) were those well-off kids who for whatever reason didn't take a shining to the athletic or band cliques and didn't need to work.
I will admit that my experience is not necessarily universal, relevant or even interesting. $.02 and all that.
Re:This is ascii, right? (Score:1)
Re:this is all good but... (Score:1)
Agreed that BBSes are alive and well! (Score:1)
into the WWW is at:
http://bccs.net [bccs.net]
GIF/BMP => ANSI (Score:1)
Looking at that site has made me thinks that ANSI would make a great theme for my homepage.
WOW!! (Score:1)
www.acid.org (still have monthly packs)
NOSTALGIA (Score:1)
And as for BBS's go, Renegade was the best software and you all know it!
Re:Is it just me, or... (Score:1)
I guess I'm entitled to keep it... I've done some ascii art (not good enough to move on to ansi).
Long LiVE the lowercase i!
Re:this is all good but... (Score:1)
BTW - I have two CDs in my car which contain primarily Purple Motion/Skaven tracks
BBS's (Score:1)
when you can still make one. I know I did. It's completely different from the Internet, therefore I think BBS's will always have a warm place in our hearts.
Console rules!!!!
BTW, this site is so slow Eta Carinae will have time to explode by the time it's finished downloading!!
Re:Brings a tear to my eye. (Score:2)
Are there any really good Open Source BBS's with Renegade-style messaging and GCOM teleconference? A combination like that would kick some booty.
I've tried some BBS's for Linux, but they just don't have the same flair those two BBS's had for those tasks.
I used to run a Hacker/Phreaker bulletin board called The Digital Fallout. Had some really cool message bases since I turned away w@r3z d00dz that would post bullshit, and I looked for those people that could carry an intelligent conversation. We talked about all sorts of things, from drugs, to secrets about the telephone company, to spying, to technology, all those neat topics. We were all enthusiasts interested in the technology of the day. Ah well, those were the days.
I remember iCE, ACiD (ANSI Creators in Demand), and some other smaller groups. The internet had to come and kill it all. If anything, we need more of those close-knit groups again somehow.
Re:This may get moderated, but... (Score:1)
Back when there were legitimate connections to illegal scenes (warez, phreaking) the eliteness was also, at least superficially, a security precaution.
If the inhabitants of the scene then seemed immature, that is probably because they were. It seems unfair to necessarily expect rational conduct of 13-year-olds 8) Just think of Lord of the Flies and the whole eliteness thing doesn't sound quite so bad after all...
oh jeez, I really should get rid of this sig.
hehe, full slashdot in effect (Score:1)
Slothy
ANSI / ASCII art (Score:1)
Re:reviving the scene (Score:1)
And he made a Linux version.
And there are telnet bbs's and much much more. And othernets, (non-fido on ftn networking) are getting popular.
This may get moderated, but... (Score:1)
Watching one of these guys join a more subdued bbs was kind of like having an insightful thread on USENET, then some AOL guy coming in saying "THiS PLaCe SuXx!! eYe aM MoRe eLeeT THaN YooU@!@!!11!"
Re:Ahh... memories (Score:1)
Look him up on IRC.
-Brian AKA Mass Delusion, iCE Senior Staff