The dial-up canvas
ANSI art: 16 colors, 256 characters, one modem
ANSI art is character-based graphics drawn on the IBM PC's 437 code page: block glyphs and line characters painted in 16 colors, small enough for a 1990s modem to carry in kilobytes. It decorated every BBS login screen, file listing and art pack of the era, and this site preserves pieces of that world, including the original BBS pages from 2001.
How the medium worked
The IBM PC text mode gave artists a fixed grid: 80 columns by 25 rows, 256 glyphs in code page 437, and 16 foreground colors against 8 backgrounds. No pixels, no images: every "pixel" was a character cell. Half-block and shade glyphs approximated curves; blink mode doubled the palette cheaply. A screen full of art was a few kilobytes of text with escape codes, which is exactly why it thrived where bandwidth was measured in characters per second.
The tools, then and now
BBS-era artists worked in TheDraw, and art groups like ACiD and iCE released monthly packs that still circulate. Today the medium is alive: Moebius is the modern cross-platform editor, PabloDraw keeps the classic workflow, and both export to PNG for the web. The craft is the same: one character cell at a time. The tools page maps them all, with links.
See it here, in its natural habitat
The original BBS pages from this site's 2001 incarnation capture that world as it shipped, and the hub's exhibits carry the same DNA forward. For the wider canon, Sixteen Colors archives the art packs themselves.
Questions people ask
- What is ANSI art?
- ANSI art is character-based graphics drawn on the IBM PC's 437 code page: 256 fixed glyphs (blocks, shades, lines) colored with 16 foreground and 8 background colors. Because it renders as plain text with escape codes, a 1990s modem could carry a full-screen image in kilobytes, which is why it decorated every BBS login screen and file_id.diz.
- How do I view ANSI art?
- In a terminal that honors ANSI escape codes, or in any web viewer. Modern terminals render it directly; for .ans files, a viewer like PabloDraw (Windows, open source) or a terminal with the right font at 9x16 cell proportions shows it as the artist intended. This site's BBS captures are already rendered as viewable captures, no setup needed.
- How do I create ANSI art?
- With a dedicated editor. The classic BBS-era tool was TheDraw; today the standard is Moebius (cross-platform, open source) and PabloDraw. You draw on a character grid, painting cells with CP437 glyphs and the 16-color palette; most editors also export to PNG for sharing outside terminals.
- Where can I see ANSI art online?
- The largest public archive is Sixteen Colors, which preserves years of art packs from groups like ACiD and iCE. For BBS screens in their natural habitat, this site preserves captures from the original sdelic.org BBS pages, and the original 2001 pages are archived here as they shipped.