Origin

I'm maze, a security engineer by trade and a hacker by heart. When I'm not at my day job, I love to tinker with electronics, run experiments with digital radio and grow tropical fish. In the '90s I was in my teen ages and got to experience what fun dial up BBSes used to be; there wasn't really an active art scene over here in The Netherlands, but of course some of the art from the larger overseas groups made it to those boards which was an absolutely amazing experience. Since the early days of DOS, I've never abandoned my love for text mode, and I've been a UNIX/Linux user since '95 with a strong passion for the text terminal still.

Years later, I found out about the Dark Domain project by RaD Man/ACID, this must have been somewhere in 2005. I ordered the DVD and after a long wait, I was the proud owner of what was the best collection of ANSi art packs ever assembled in a single archive. Very proudly I put it on a shelve with other precious artifacts, happily gathering dust for quite a while actually. Then fast forward almost a decade, I came in contact with an awesome group of Python developers hacking on the X/84 BBS system, I joined the development team and became passionate about what ever were the glorious days of dial up BBSing again.

Story

By then, I also started thinking it's a shame that this really nice DVD with precious art packs didn't get the attention that it deserved; myself for one didn't find it very convenient having to first locate my optical drive from the pile of deprecated hardware, then to extract zip files and finally fire up a viewer to look at he artworks, so the idea was started to build a website that would allow anyone to view the pack contents.

An event worth mentioning that was the drive to also start displaying Amiga ASCII on the site properly, was the fact that ASCII Arena seized operations. I was able to salvage most collys that were displayed on the site, and this kicked off the Amiga section on textmod.es. All credits for this amazing collection go to truck and the former ASCII Arena crew; combined with the awesome font publications by DMG of trueschool.se, I had all ingredients required to display these gems properly.

Trends

As with the glory days of BBSes, the glory days of IRC are mostly over too. There's still a supportive and hardcore delegation present on IRC, but what really seems to reunite most (ANSi) artist is Facebook. Yep, Facebook for goodness sake. Ah well, via Facebook I've come in contact with a lot of the old timers from Acid, ICE, CIA, but also the crews that are still active like Impure, Mistigris and Blocktronics. It's with the help of these people and various contributions that we've been able to backfill more "lost" art packs and I'm hoping that people will continue to send old packs and collies my way.

Future

I'm hoping that the collection on textmod.es will be archived by some of the larger internet archives one day (hint hint . The whole intent and purpose for the project was to have a properly tagged and categorized collection of text art works from the PC ANSi and Amiga ASCII scene, as well as other popular 8-bit platforms such as C64 but maybe even ATASCII or Teletext. Since the project has only one developer (yours truly), there's no point in being too ambitious though, but I'm hoping to find collaboration with other people sharing the same dream of having an archive that's representative of the text mode art scene.

Peace
~maze