I’ve never actually lol’ed at a Linux meme until today.

Alright

Well, interoffice memos.

Not certain of whether you’re thinking specifically of plain ASCII art or also ANSI art (which was specifically around that time and made use of PC drawing characters and ANSI escape sequences), but there’s a software package called ansilove that will render ANSI art, as well as some related text art formats, into an image for viewing.

https://www.ansilove.org/

It’s packaged in Debian Trixie.

https://16colo.rs/ is a gallery of ANSI art. A lot of the thumbnails are in grayscale, but tap on them and they’ll open up and have a lot of colorful artwork.

Anyone remember The Boy With Immovable Hair (TBWIH)?

Terminal emulators are bloat

The Linux kernel itself contains a terminal emulator — that’s how you can swap among virtual terminals on the console — and unless the code was rewritten at some point, that’s really the true core of Linux; the Linux kernel originally was a terminal emulator, before the other stuff got added. Before Linus even made his first announcement, when it was still a purely one-man project that he was banging on:

https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-very-first-interview-about-linux

The very first interview about Linux with Linus Torvalds - Oct 28, 1992

LN: Please give a short summary of the history of Linux.

Linus: Difficult. “Linux” didn’t really exist until about August-91 - before that what I had was essentially just a very basic protected mode system that had evolved from a glorified “Hello world” program into a even more glorified terminal emulator. Linux stopped for quite a while at the terminal emulator stage: I played around with Minix, and used my protected mode program to read news from the univerity machine. No down/upload, but it did a fair vt100 emulation, and did it by using two tasks which communicated from keybodard->modem and modem->screen.

By mid-summer -91, “Linux” was able to read the disk (joyful moment), and eventually had a small and stupid disk driver and a simple buffer cache. So I started out trying to make a filesystem, and used the Minix fs for simple practical reasons: that way I already had a file layout I could test things on. After some more programming (talk about glossing things over), I had a very simple UNIX that had some of the basic functionalities of the real thing: I could run small test-programs under it.

That being said, I think that most people are probably using the framebuffer console these days — you aren’t usually talking to your graphics card in text mode on x86-64 machines, but rather in graphics mode, and an image of text is being rendered and handed to the graphics card, and I don’t know if internally, the original virtual terminal code is used beneath that or if there’s a different stack and two independent in-kernel virtual terminal emulators.

Just remap caps lock smh

If you use the standard editor, ed, then these sorts of things are no obstacle.

And they tell me printing pdfs to read is waste!

Surprisingly, just one. I did make a couple of mistakes, though. (e.g. typing an 8 instead of a ’ on the bottom-left corner of the arch, and adding the dashes after 9.9.9.9 in the ping output instead of later on).

That’s literally card punchers.

Edit: better link, with video.

I want to see someone with too much time on their hands build a haunted typewriter, by hooking an electronic typewriter up to an LLM

Like a TTY?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter