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What Is Textmode?

polyducks.co.uk

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Re: What Is Textmode?

#21

Post by gostsamo »

hackernewds wrote: post #19
qsort wrote: post #3

In a way, the limitations of those machines made the data representation so cool. These days everything is a flat raster buffer with every pixel being independently settable. It's incomparably more convenient but also more "boring". Same thing with music and audio, we have enough RAM to waste to let Nyquist-Shannon take care of the problem. I guess the lesson is boring = better?

> we have enough RAM to waste to let Nyquist-Shannon take care of the problem. sorry what is this?

Nyquist theorem Shannon's theorem -> noise sampling + information encoding. Overall if I understand correctly GP says that audio is recorded without any smart techniques besides the basics. Implies that this is bad because memory resources are wasted. Does not discuss how smart techniques might waste computational resources.

Re: What Is Textmode?

#22

Post by Scubabear68 »

ale42 wrote: post #16

Note that ANSI is not BBS-specific and was not _created_ for BBSs... it was already around and BBSs made heavy use of it. EDIT: what I find is missing on the post is Teletext art (see e.g., http://teletextart.co.uk/ )

Right, it was for controlling terminals originally.

I recall in the early 90s I worked for an ag chemical company as an intern. They had a horrid budgeting app written on some old crusty DB platform, I was asked to make the text interface “better”.

We accessed via VT terminal emulators, so I created a library of ANSI drawing primitives and created a primitive window / menu system out of it. It blew everyone’s mind at the time, but it was only a couple of week’s work.

* Edited to add a lot of DOS software and terminal stuff did similar things, including some nifty Terminate and Stay Resident utilities (TSR!).

Re: What Is Textmode?

#23

Post by qsort »

gostsamo wrote: post #21
hackernewds wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we have enough RAM to waste to let Nyquist-Shannon take care of the problem. sorry what is this?

Nyquist theorem Shannon's theorem -> noise sampling + information encoding. Overall if I understand correctly GP says that audio is recorded without any smart techniques besides the basics. Implies that this is bad because memory resources are wasted. Does not discuss how smart techniques might waste computational resources.

I'm saying something else entirely.

Back in the day, home computers did not have enough resources to play music like modern computers do. They instead relied on custom hardware to make noise. An example is the MOS SID 6581, which was on the original C64.

Once you have enough resources this is unnecessary, because you can just make a giant sample of the entire song you want to play, and that's going to sound at least as good as analog recording (and possibly better, depending on what technology you are using to make the analog record).

Re: What Is Textmode?

#25

Post by JackFr »

I used to be a big fan of giant ASCII art in log files, and I still like to include a big banner on server startup, but most of the cloud logging solutions like Splunk and the ELK stack don’t really handle big ASCII pictures in the middle of the log.

I was working at a big bank about ten years ago where we had a half-assed poorly implemented compute grid — some customization of a terrible IBM product. For viewing logs across all machines we had a home grown web app which would allow you to navigate through them. I realized the app didn’t sanitize the log output for display, and I started to include animated gifs and memes into my error messages. My boss told me to cut it out, I said, no, someone should fix the log viewer. It took me about an hour to fuzz inputs on our customer facing application that would generate a server error log which could execute arbitrary JavaScript on our machines. The log viewer got fixed.

Re: What Is Textmode?

#27

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Aardwolf wrote: post #11
qsort wrote: post #3

In a way, the limitations of those machines made the data representation so cool. These days everything is a flat raster buffer with every pixel being independently settable. It's incomparably more convenient but also more "boring". Same thing with music and audio, we have enough RAM to waste to let Nyquist-Shannon take care of the problem. I guess the lesson is boring = better?

Yes, imposing restrictions can result in awesome and creative art! E.g. using a small (e.g. 16-color) color palette for pixel art, making art using semi-graphics block characters, music with mod trackers, ...

I've had a lot of fun fiddling with pico-8 (https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php), a virtual console with its own code, graphics and music/sound editor - heavily restricted (in terms of e.g. amount of code and graphics, it's designed so that games fit in an image file), maybe a bit more advanced than a Gameboy.

But being restricted like that made it feel more free. Don't need to think about function or variable names too much since only two dozen characters fit on screen. Graphics, just click some pixels until it looks like something.

But it's powerful enough to make games like Celeste (https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=2145) or even 3D games and demoscene things.

Re: What Is Textmode?

#30

Post by danhau »

AndyMcConachie wrote: post #26

Does anyone know of a good library for easily making static webpages that look like old BBS ANSI graphics? I'm fed up with the modern web and seek reduced fidelity in order to focus on content.

Maybe not exactly what you‘re looking for, but you could give https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss a try.

More here: https://github.com/troxler/awesome-css-frameworks#specialize...

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