Today I will institute a another series: Nostalgia, or fond rememberings of the past. The first thing I would like to talk about is an activity I was fascinated with up until I graduated High School. That activity was creating computerized animation, of all kinds. I used to be quite prolific at it, although not talented, creating dozens of animations of different stripes throughout two periods, each with a different set of applications.
The first time I discovered amateur computer animation was on Q-Link, predecessor to America Online. Q-Link was a huge, online BBS accessible to Commodore 64 computers at a maximum speed of 2400bps. I rarely got to use it, since I was usually outside the local calling area for the access numbers and most of the services on Q-Link had an additional 8 cents-per-minute fee, on top of the long distance charges. However, when I moved to Lebanon, Tennessee (a small town which almost serves as a suburb of Nashville), I entered the local calling area of Q-Link and began to use it regularly.
My first activities were chatrooms. Not only would I frequent general chat, but I eventually found a room called the “Red Dragon Inn” where people would role-play as various Tolkein– and Dungeons-&-Dragons-inspired characters. I created a personage of myself and had a grand old time. For some reason I found the stupid geek jokes to be hilarious, and loved every minute of my experience with this ancestor of the Internet.
Soon I branched out into other areas, and found the file download section. In that section they had a category called “BBS Animation.” My interest piqued, I downloaded several of them along with a player application and watched them online. They were simple text files that were designed to be transmitted
over a modem and displayed onscreen as the bytes representing the C-64‘s native “PETSCII” character set were transmitted. The player I downloaded emulated this, printing the characters onscreen with a delay between each, emulating the speed of a 2400 baud modem. The PETSCII character set included the alphabet, as well as various lines, boxes, and grids that could be used to create rudimentary graphics. By printing these characters one at a time on the screen, along with commands to move the cursor in different directions, then erasing the characters and replacing them with others, one could create a simplistic, jerky animation from them.
The first animation I downloaded (that I could get to work) was called “Illinois Fred,” a horrible parody Indiana Jones adventure where Fred replicated certain scenes from the movies, accompanied by his trusty sidekick, “Short Square.” I remember it was created by a guy with the screenname “Omega Code.” It used the PETSCII character set quite effectively, and even had a scene where Fred flew across a map of the United States via the hallmark directional line, although in this “wacky” parody the line traced all over the place with many loop-the-loops.
From that moment on, I was fascinated by PETSCII animation and quickly downloaded an Editor Program. I learned the basic characters for creating simple stick figures and set to work creating my own animated visions. Over the course of a couple years I created “Illinois Fred” knockoffs, adventures set in space, fantasy realms, and mock “Big Battles” between various real-life friends I had at the time and in the past. It was good fun.
Because the animation was so crappy, I could hardly get anybody interested in it. It was very slow and – I’m sure – boring to most of the people I showed it to. This did not daunt me however. Eventually I got a friend of mine, Harold, interested in the animation as well and we would spend hours using the church’s Commodore 128 to create them, with him sometimes giving me tips and instructions for animations of his own. I even uploaded a couple of my better ones to Q-Link, and one of them got a “star” rating, which meant it was recommended by the moderators.
After I moved away from Lebanon and got put into reform school, I no longer had the opportunity to create or download these animations, and after I was free, I never went back to it. I eventually enrolled in Saint Academy in [REDACTED], Kentucky and discovered a new form: HyperCard animation.
I was fascinated by the simple Macintosh computers the school held (because the Principal was an enthusiastic Mac supporter) and their graphical interfaces, along with several of the simple games the school had installed. So, I purchased a couple of Macintosh books from the local mall’s bookstore that featured games and applications included on a supplementary discs. The games were interesting, but on those discs I discovered a functional version of the HyperCard application, and I looked up a trick whereby one could unlock the full version by entering a certain code. After exploring its functions for awhile, I realized that by shuffling the “cards” in order one could create animation frames. Although it was slow (probably 5-10 frames per second depending on the detail), it was much faster than “BBS Animations” and was overall better suited for what I wanted to do. Really, it was a precursor to Flash animations and, thinking back on it, was a little ahead of its time.
I created many animations with this program. One of them was the “Fuchs Stick Figure Theater” which predated “Stick Death” and featured stick figures being violently killed in extremely bloody, humorous ways. Another one I created with a young Bill called “Marvin the Ninjutsu Skateboarder,” where a cartwheeling, jump-kicking “radical” skateboard teenager (I think he even wore a backwards baseball cap) would square off against faceless ninjas along with various, evil analogues of teachers at the school that we didn’t like. I created a simple “Dragon’s Lair” style game where, by entering commands via an onscreen arrow pad, one could control the direction the animation went. (It was easily circumvented though, by using HyperCards “skip frame” command.) My final project, my Senior year, was to create a fully interactive tech demo explaining computer networking and the Internet. I had a lot of fun with it.
After graduating from the Adademy, I became enmeshed in the improving PC videogames of the time, discovered the Internet (and the pornography that went along with it) and lost interest. I did create a couple of Flash animations when they became commonplace, but never went back to it with the enthusiasm I once held. I haven’t created any serious animation since the late 90’s.
Since that time, I have experienced waves of nostalgia for those days. I have long since lost the C-64 and Macintosh discs that contained these animations, so I tried to find more information (and perhaps examples) on the Internet. There are no real results on search engines for “Q-Link BBS Animations” — it
appears to be a term only used by Q-Link and, of course, BBSes. I did find PETSCII.COM which has a repository of various PETSCII art, but none of them are animated. I haven’t found any HyperCard animations from that time period either. Although I displayed competence at creating such animations, I have never desired to put in the effort to learn the ins and outs of a modern animation application.