Tag: fire escape
-
Recycling ANSI art: Tracing the origins of Fire Escape’s logon screens
Whether you call it “ripping” or “remixing”, the BBS scene had a long tradition of adapting and reusing earlier ANSI art. Fire Escape was one of many sysops around the world who often repurposed older so-called “public domain” ANSI art to enliven her bulletin board. She was famous in St. Louis, Missouri, for her meticulous…
-
The mystery of the Solar Realms Elite title screen
In my recent series ANSI art and webcomics, I debunked a false assertion that began in a history book and propagated across the web. Now it’s time to solve the mystery of an old ANSI art screen that I myself helped propagate across the web 20 years ago. Allow me to explain — but first,…
-
Visualizing 314: The directories, the data, and the caveats
This is the final part of a three-part series. In this post I’m going to discuss Fire Escape’s BBS directory formats, the directory parser and the dataset; I’ll also give some caveats about this data.
-
Visualizing 314: The St. Louis scene in charts
This is the second part of a three-part series. It’s chart time! In this post you can explore several graphs that show facets of the St. Louis BBS scene.
-
Visualizing 314: Fire Escape’s BBS Directory
This is the first part of a three-part series. If there was a superstar of St. Louis BBSes during the 1990s, it had to be Fire Escape.
