ANSI… in this case refers to the symbols, characters, and colors created by combining keystrokes on Windows.
Windows? WINDOWS? What the heck does ANSI art have to do with MS Windows?
It’s basically an extension of the ASCII character set of the usual numbers, letters, and symbols on a keyboard.
Basically, no. The character set is straight-up code page 437. The ANSI stuff is really just colors and blink effects.
I got serious motion after-effect from that video. Quite hypnotic.
I have clarified my post. Thank you for your very kind correction.
ANSI is the American National Standards Institute, the promulgators of ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. The ANSI codes you’re talking about - blink, underline, reverse, etc. are dumb terminal escape sequences first implemented in DEC’s genre-dominating VT100 video terminal. Sadly, I still have them pretty much memorized, despite having not used them in around 20 years.
And as you rightly point out, this has basically NOTHING to do with windows, and Microsoft historically has had support for them that ranged the gamut from laughable to non-existent.
Don’t ask me about EBCDIC.
For a little more about ANSI and the art scene, I did a talk at BSides about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILNs1GChGDk&list=PLNhlcxQZJSm8OAGyypgVeEnYCJW_oY2vt&index=2
How many feet long would this be? Or meters or cubits or whatever units you socialists use?
It depends on your standard for height. 
on the old 80x25 resolution, I believe we calculated over 130 monitors tall. Then the question is, how big are the monitors?
Thanks BoingBoing. This is what I needed today.
I associate “ANSI” art with Windows since it is based on the IBM PC 8-bit extensions to 7-bit ASCII. I always thought Unicode art would take off like crazy, but maybe too many permutations is a bad thing.
ALT+196 I will never forget. Not sure what current state of the art tools are, or if TheDraw.exe still carries the day.
@SaberTaylor1 - TheDraw was long ago surpassed by ACiDDraw, and in more recent years, both have been blown completely out of the water with a modern editor, PabloDraw. It allows for multiple artists to edit the same file concurrently in a client/server arrangement, among other improvements.
Dear Jebus, make it stop…
I thought the link to “scroll it yourself” would lead to an actual text page, not a png (which also won’t load).
The extended character set, and the ANSI escape code sequences that gave ANSI Art its color and the ability to move the cursor around was around long before Windows.
All of the text mode versions of the demosplash entries are available at: http://www.demosplash.org/2013/compo_entries/ansi_ascii_graphics/
No discussion of ASCII/ANSI art should be considered complete without a link to the excellent Sixteen Colors archive.
Thanks.
Major nostalgia bomb!
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