RETROTECHTACULAR: ASCII ART IN THE 19TH CENTURY

I saw this post on hack a day, and oddly enough my old Fortran Snoopy calendar was on there.

And as  a bonus in the comments was a talk on RTTY porn.  Obviously NFSW….  But kind of interesting & funny regarding the preservation of old things.  If the thought of ascii art port from the 1960s, along with some nude pictures from the 1920’s scare you, obviously don’t click.

To me what is crazy is that I can download an entire GIF CD faster today than I could download an image back when this stuff was new and exciting.  But I did have a 2400 baud modem.

2 thoughts on “RETROTECHTACULAR: ASCII ART IN THE 19TH CENTURY

  1. “To me what is crazy is that I can download an entire GIF CD faster today” … I found some online listings of the included files from that (Gifs Galore), if you’re curious, so you don’t necessarily have to download the whole thing unless it sounds worth your while:

    ftp://sourceforge.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.cdrom.com/pub/cdrom/cdroms/gifs/00_index.htm

    archive.org really should use “7z l *.iso” to show whats actually included. But I guess we’re (mostly) spoiled with very fast internet these days, so nobody cares. (The fact that dialup is still offered, and yet not dirt cheap, should be a crime.)

    • Sure you could browse one at a time, or just hoarde the whole ISO! … It’s madding to even point google images at the site, and just see the whole thing at once, effectively transferring it all in one go.

      Remember standalone image viewers? 386 assembly optimized jpeg routines? I remember one cool one I used that was a TSR, and it would inspect filestreams as they were written to disk, and if it detected an image it’d display it as it was being written (transferred). Inconceivable things today.

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