ANSI artists — the interior decorators of the seamy side of cyberspace
As it turned out, simply getting your hands on the phone number of a warez-trading BBS didn’t mean you could just hop aboard the free-games gravy train. The elder nerds who had first colonized cyberspace—fans, it seemed, of Heinlein’s sci-fi—introduced us to the concept of TANSTAAFL: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. The System Operator (SysOp) of a warez BBS had to believe you were going to contribute something of value to his little illegal ecosystem. After all, he was taking real risks—criminal charges, hardware confiscation—by hosting this hub for unlawful commerce. He wasn’t doing it out of the goodness of his heart.
If you didn't have fresh warez to offe (usually 0 to 3 days old)—thereby earning file points and maintaining a propitious upload-to-download ratio—you had to find some other way to contribute. The most obvious option was money, though even that wasn't straightforward in the pre-PayPal era, as cybercriminals on both ends of the transaction were understandably reluctant to leave behind any trail of incriminating details like their real names, mailing addresses, or banking information. In the digital underground, other categories of contraband could serve as currency, from the already mentioned hacking to cracking tools. Our entry point into the ecosystem was through “oldwarez”: pirated software no longer fresh, but still in demand, pulled from the collective back stacks by a power user and made available on request.
But all this escalating mercantile exchange came at a cost: it ate into your game-playing time. Once you acquired fresh warez, the way to maximize your investment was to immediately re-upload it to other warez boards that didn't yet have it. After a week or so of doing this—and given that MS-DOS wasn't a multitasking operating system (DesqView from Quarterdeck Office Systems aside)—you might finally get a chance to log a session playing the game you'd downloaded, only to discover that it was uncracked, untranslated, didn't work, or simply not much fun to play. Surely there had to be an easier way!
Underground BBSes generally looked better than their public domain counterparts. A customized board with original menus, prompts, and splash screens always drew more attention and interest than a generic, stock setup that looked like it came straight out of the box. For this reason, underground SysOps prioritized BBS software that supported extensive visual customization, whether by design or through accessible hex-editing trickery of beautification through modifying strings. If your board looked slick enough that people wanted to check it out, you had swagger and bragging rights over your peers. The more users eager to access your virtual speakeasy, the more selective you could be about who you let in, reducing risk and minimizing exposure. One key method for boosting visibility was decorating BBS pages with ANSI art—a text-based computer art form that used the 256-character set along with 16 foreground and 8 background colors to create elaborate images.
ANSI artists, the interior decorators of the seamy side of cyberspace and the sole source of this swagger, were often high-priority recruits for SysOps looking for ways to elevate their underground BBSes. It was only through their typically pro bono donations of art that a swinging hot spot could be immediately identifiable as such. Yet, just as the SysOps of underground BBSes required some form of compensation to grant access to the back room, the artists could have their inspiration turbocharged by offers of unmetered, no-ratio “leech” access to a warez board. In this way, computer art became a viable pathway for newcomers who'd stumbled into the underground scene — an express route into the ranks of the elite without putting in the work and time circulating fresh warez and maintaining their upload/download ratios. At the core, the currency was the spare time of teenagers. And investing that time in crafting dope graphics was an effective way to deliver value and ascend quickly. But what if you didn't draw? What if you didn't have a visually creative bone in your body? Well, there were other roles to play.
While most contributors were visual ANSI and ASCII artists creating artwork to enhance the BBSing experience and trumpet the virtues of their favorite BBSes and crews in CompuShow after logging off, there were also others in the mix. Would-be demo programmers looking for grist for their code mill, of visual and tracked musical assets provided by others to be folded, spindled and mutilated according to their favorite algorithmic techniques. Couriers, mostly exploiting phone phreaking loopholes, shuttled warez across area codes but could also be tapped to spread the legend of one small pond’s big fish to nearby waters. And, strangely, for a brief momment and only in some localities, you could be viably identify as a writer of "lit"(short for "literature"), composing poems on dark, mature and grim themes — that happened to coincide with the dark, mature and grim names teenaged SysOps chose for their underground BBSes after.
Of course, there were also shortcuts. If you were in a hurry and didn't want to cultivate any creative or technical skills, you could just "rip" (i.e., plagiarise) the work of a peer—ideally someone far enough away to never to find out—or repurpose materials sourced from elsewhere and hope you didn't get caught. After all, we're all here to commit crimes and violate intellectual property rights anyway, so really, what's the big deal? If you had access to a scanner and knew how to use it, you could digitize interior illustrations from your favorite RPG sourcebooks, run them through a few filters, slap some logos on them, and voilà—who would know the difference?
The culmination of this mindset was GIF2ANS, a program that converted bitmap images into ANSI art by dividing the image into an 80x25 grid—the same dimensions as a standard text mode screen—and assigning each cell a colored text character approximating the image data within. It was a brilliant programmer's solution on paper, but in practice, it produced egregiously ugly converted screens that were immediately identifiable as such. A precursor, in a way, to today’s AI-generated imagery.