ART SCENE : an archive of ASCII cracker graffiti

This site has an amazing documentation of .nfo files, and recorded history of early ASCII and cracker art.

"If you give people a way to express themselves, two things will happen: Creativity and Competition.

So it has been with computers and electronics since the first years of the vacuum tube and the transistor; People have always tried to inject a little human creation onto the bare metal of these systems, finding ways to make the machines play music or show artwork or do things in a new and surprising way. While some debate might exist as to whether these sorts of projects should be considered "art", it's quite obvious that the people who spent the hours wringing something new and different out of the hardware and software thought it was.

What the proliferation of the personal computer brought was a new and striking medium for thousands of people who might not have otherwise thought themselves artists to work in, many times creating the first example of a given technique or approach. And with the personal computer came an amazing raft of standards intended to make the saving of data more efficient and compact. As a new standard made itself known (ASCII, ATASCII, VT100, ANSI, RIP and many others), people would flock from around the world to try their hand at creating something worth showing to others in that new realm. In ways the standard-makers never intended or expected, these new artworks came firing out from every direction, passed among BBSes and the later the Internet, transmitted from modem to modem, traded by disk between people meeting at social gatherings.

And in these social gatherings, both online and offline, came the first computer art scenes."

The artscene site is here, and the archive of cracked softward .nfo files is here. Click here to download a .zip file of some personally expressive ASCII graffiti (some shown below).