The Art of Warez [video]
This has been going around Facebook for a couple days now. It takes me back! I was an &quot;artist&quot;† in one of the better-known second-tier groups (if ICE and ACID comprise the first tier) and ran a fairly popular, though relatively small-scale, BBS in Chicago.<p>It&#x27;s a good video and worth watching, but (I think) gets some things wrong that kept snapping me out of it.<p>For one thing, the link between HPAV boards (&quot;HPAC&quot; was not a common term) and warez boards is way overblown. The major groups all probably did have a couple of H&#x2F;P people attached in some way, but for the most part I think all that amounted to was setting up conference bridges, which was super easy to do. The bit about &quot;dummy 1-800 numbers&quot; --- and someone could tell me that did really happen in a bunch of places --- rings false, because at the time, 800 numbers were perceived as risky, due to ANI. I got in trouble for phone bills like everyone else, but really, unless you were actually downloading warez, dialing into random BBS&#x27;s across North America wasn&#x27;t <i>that</i> expensive.<p>Warez boards and H&#x2F;P boards were very different subcultures.<p>(For that matter: many boards <i>were</i> linked together through the FIDO protocols, which was like the BBS equivalent of Usenet).<p>I also don&#x27;t remember much of a crossover between the ANSI scene and the demoscene (they were both linked through the broader BBS scene, of course). I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s the case that ANSI people fed into demo stuff.<p>There are technical details in here I think are wrong as well. Most notably, I don&#x27;t think it was modem speeds that broke ANSI, but rather modern operating systems. We didn&#x27;t use ANSI because it was space efficient so much as because the only way to access a BBS was through a terminal emulator, and, for a long time, that meant MS-DOS. Also: the amount of technical skill you needed to do this stuff is way overblown. MS-DOS is cryptic compared to macOS and Win10, but it&#x27;s how <i>everything</i> got done in the late 1980s and early 1990s; your parents often knew as much as you did about getting around on MS-DOS. Once people started SLIP&#x27;ing into ISPs on Windows and OS&#x2F;2, it was just as easy to get GIFs as it was to get ANSI art.<p>It&#x27;s hard to blame the video for that; my understanding is that it started out as a school final project, and, at any rate, it&#x27;s trying to communicate to a lay audience.<p>Finally: I&#x27;m sort of spitting my drink out at the assertion that ANSI artists were exploring undiscovered new modes of visual expression, or that ANSI shading techniques are comparable to major artistic movements. If you want to say that about any countercultural art form, you&#x27;d say it about real graffiti, from which ANSI derived a lot of its visual style. The artistic-technical work involved in graffiti is, I think, a lot more serious than ANSI was. Looking back at old ANSI packs, a lot of it is just the technical-technical work of transcribing a reference image from a comic book or album cover into a pixel editor. That, by the way, didn&#x27;t take weeks or months; once you got the hang of it, it was pretty quick (and by the early 1990s, a lot of that artwork was being drawn specifically for and with high-res viewers, so literally you were just using TheDraw as a sort of zoomed-in pixel editor).<p>I think pixel artists today work with much more significant constraints, do more interesting work, and probably don&#x27;t draw a whole lot on the 1990s ANSI scene.<p>Eagerly awaiting my comeuppance from an ICE or ACID person on this critique. :)<p>† <i>not a good one</i>