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Old usenet maps

olduse.net

These maps were largely a work by Steve McGeady, who later went on to be an executive at Intel. His testimony in the Microsoft antitrust trial in 1998 had a big impact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_McGeady

I kind of can't even imagine the hours that might have gone into laying these out so they'd work in ASCII.

Nothing compared to http://sexchart.org/sexchart.9.43

Now a days at least there are apps to do this. There's https://monodraw.helftone.com/ for example, although I never used it.

The hard part is laying out the planar graph, not laying out boxes.

There are a number of ASCII/ANSI-art specific editors that allow moving arbitrary rectancular chunks of text in any direction.

Classic example is TheDraw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw) which dates from 1986.

I used to use TheDraw all the time to make screens for games, my bbs, and just general stuffing around! Is the author still around? Would love to send him a belated registration fee!

Couldn't find any social media links for them, but they are on LinkedIn if you do a bit of Google searching.

Plain text rulez http://textfiles.com/100/whytext.oct

Ever taken a look at the ASCII/ANSI art from the likes of ACiD and iCE from that era? :-)

Some galleries/samples here:

http://www.acid.org/

http://www.ice.org/

Bit of a nostalgia trip if you ever dialled into a BBS.

I miss the old days of Usenet.

well, except the trolls and spam...

Seems like this would be better laid out using a fixed-width font. HTML supports it, why not use it?

Looks fine here. It's using "GlassTTYVT220", which is a custom font, so that might not have loaded properly for you.

That's exactly what it was. After I wrote that I went into the stylesheet and disabled the custom font. It worked a treat.

I sent patch to fix this to the maintainer.

What was the fix? If it was the name of a specific fixed-width font, you should add "monospace" as the final alternative for the CSS. This allows the browser to pick a suitable font among the ones present on the client machine. (For a list of the other generic font family names to use in other instances, see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-family)

  -  font-family: GlassTTYVT220;
  +  font-family: GlassTTYVT220, monospace;

Man I am telling you, get this font.

It is a 100% clone of the actual vt220 font, and therefore is the ultimate in green-screen retro awesomeness.

Basically, by getting this font and using it (esp on a BSD) you have the original 'theme' for the Unix CLI, since pretty much everyone (yes being hyperbolic) used real UNIX (or 'BSD UNIX' as it was called before the suit) on VAX with DEC terminals around this time when most of the core CLI tools that make up the core of the system to this day were being developed.. Things just look 'right'.

As a vt220 owner and amateur Unixologist, I am very glad for this font.

http://asdasd.rpg.fi/~svo/glasstty

That's quite nice actually! Here's what HN looks like in w3m with GlassTTY http://i.imgur.com/3Mq6omo.png

Mike Koss wrote an Apple ][ terminal emulator called "The Terminal" in 1981 that displayed 70 columns by 32 rows on the 270 x 192 pixel hires screen in a 3x5 font he designed. That's how I viewed ITS, Unix and the ARPANET for many years, until I finally got an 80 column card. squint

I bet that could font could show the whole map on one page!

https://web.archive.org/web/20120206091422/http://mckoss.com...

Can it be achieved in .pcf format?

I am glad I am not the only one who felt this. I immediately thought 'ooh what font is this? it's better than other VT220 fonts I've seen' - looked in the css, got the url, and um, stole, it :)

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