Some old "Merry Christmas" ASCII art I did

[DoYouKubuntu]

Here's some ASCII art I made back in the '80s for the holidays. The furniture store chain I worked at was actually owned by a Jewish family, but they celebrated Christmas for their employees' sake, so putting up a 'Merry Christmas' graphic on the system was not inappropriate. I took this picture in my office at home, on the Wyse 60 terminal I had in there; it had a dedicated phone line for its modem so I could always connect to the server at work. I know I took some other pictures that were actually better (this one cuts off part of the display), but I have no idea where they are at this point...probably out in the garage with my SCO Xenix manuals. The scan of the photo lights it up too much so its green color almost looks white in some places, but it is what it is!

[woodsmoke]

Re: Some old "Merry Christmas" ASCII art I did

quite nostalgic!
lol
woodsmoke

[DoYouKubuntu]

Re: Some old "Merry Christmas" ASCII art I did

I know! Who needs all those fancy-schmancy newfangled graphics when you can have ASCII art instead?

[vinnywright]

Re: Some old "Merry Christmas" ASCII art I did

nice .......... makes a nice Christmas wallpaper



VINNY

[DoYouKubuntu]

Re: Some old "Merry Christmas" ASCII art I did

nice .......... makes a nice Christmas wallpaper

Cool! Vinny, I just uploaded a larger version of the image I linked to in my OP; it would be better for wallpaper, so grab it from here if you're so inclined.

[vinnywright]

Re: Some old "Merry Christmas" ASCII art I did

sweet just did ................thanks mom likes it .......she was a programmer from the old cobalt Fortran days

VINNY

[oshunluvr]

Re: Some old "Merry Christmas" ASCII art I did

Cute! Caused a flashback for me - kinda a long tale...

In the early 80's I worked in a Air Traffic facility with about 50 RADAR scopes arraigned along two aisles with the scopes facing each other across the aisles.. Each scope had an associated text message and computer input screen (acronym CRD for Computer Readout Device - we called them crud's) attached to a keyboard next to the radar scope. The screen was text only monochrome green and a unusual format - portrait orientation and about 9 inches tall by 5 inches wide. Each of the keyboards had a message bell in the keyboard under a red lighted MESSAGE button. It would ring and flash red whenever a computer sent message arrived at your CRD.

The "host" computer was an IBM 9020 which actually was four IBM 360's running together. These were 2nd generation magnetic core memory machines! Software was loaded via punched paper-tape and then stored on those old reel-to-reel four-foot tall monsters you see in old 70's movies and a "reboot" took about 2 hours.

One of the old programmers had, in the early 70's, programmed an ASCII picture of Santa's sleigh and reindeer with a floating "Ho Ho Ho, Merry Christmas" above Santa's head. The whole picture that was about three times as wide as the CRD's. Only once a year just before midnight on Xmas Eve Night the program would run.

Santa's reindeer would lead him and his sleigh along the four rows of CRD's from the start of row one down to the end, across the aisle to row two, up row two, around the corner and down row three, and finally up row four. As the picture passed through each CRD the keyboards would crazily flash red and ring madly as Santa delivered his happy holiday message and all of us controllers who were stuck working the Christmas Eve midnight shift would get a smile that lasted until we got home at 6am Christmas morning.

The best ACSII picture program ever written!

Thanks for reminding me, DYK. I hope you and yours have a very nice holiday season.

[bsniadajewski]

Re: Some old "Merry Christmas" ASCII art I did

That's just slick, DYK.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Re: Some old "Merry Christmas" ASCII art I did

What a great story, oshun! Thanks for sharing. I'm glad my pic helped transport you down memory lane for a bit.

Your post brought back some memories for me:

Punched cards--the furniture store where I worked doing data entry while in college was, at that time, using IBM System/3 mainframes, and I worked on a Decision Data 9610 keypunch machine. It used 96 column cards and--guess what?!--I have a stack of them around here somewhere. They came in pretty colors including blue and green.

Mag tapes--at my last job, at a data processing company, some of our clients were using mainframes and needed their data put on tape when we were done with it. I'd never touched a 9-track magnetic tape up until then, and had no clue about 1600, 6250, ASCII/EBCDIC, whatever! But I learned.

I have very fond memories of both those companies, the former because it's where I plunged in and became a UNIX lover (and programmer and sysadmin), and the latter because of my personal relationship with the owner--who had the amazing idea for me to bring my baby to work with me. (My GREAT DANE baby!)

[SteveRiley]

Re: Some old "Merry Christmas" ASCII art I did

In a console window:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Give it a third of a minute or so to start. Sit back and enjoy.

(Oh, and DYK -- very cool job on the retr'art.)

[DoYouKubuntu]

Re: Some old "Merry Christmas" ASCII art I did

In a console window:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Give it a third of a minute or so to start. Sit back and enjoy.

Oh my goodness--that was amazing. I can't even imagine the HOURS it must've taken some geek(s) to do that.

(Oh, and DYK -- very cool job on the retr'art.)

Thanks. Back in the day, THIS geek sat around and spent hours [in the wee hours of the morning] doing nonsense like that!

On April Fool's Day one year, I put up a fake login screen. Keep in mind that we're talking late '80s, early '90s, so everything was command line based, and all users were greeted with the standard UNIX login prompt. Depending on their username, once they logged in I directed them to the appropriate menus. Anyway, I thought it would be fun putting up a fake login screen and doing some funny things as users TRIED to get logged in. Um...it didn't go over so well when the owner of the company tried logging in and couldn't. I got a panicked phone call from someone at work telling me he was fuming. (See, he almost NEVER logged in. WTF were the odds that he would THAT morning?!) Oh well. *shrug*

[SteveRiley]

Re: Some old "Merry Christmas" ASCII art I did

WTF were the odds that he would THAT morning?!

Oh come on. Surely you realize that the odds of unexpected WTFs are directly proportional to one's attempts at FSOs!

[DoYouKubuntu]

Re: Some old "Merry Christmas" ASCII art I did

WTF were the odds that he would THAT morning?!

Oh come on. Surely you realize that the odds of unexpected WTFs are directly proportional to one's attempts at FSOs!

I guess I didn't at the time--but I learned! Seriously, he almost NEVER logged in. He was older and kind of technophobic and, luckily, really didn't need to access much via computer because he had other people doing it for him. So I felt extremely confident that he wouldn't try logging in that morning. In retrospect, I could/should have skipped the fake login screen on his terminal based on his TTY number...but hindsight is 20/20, right?