Plain-text zine

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duration: whole day (10-16)

How do you create a fanzine - an inheritly visual medium - using only plain text? To find out how we'll take a trip onto memory lane, back to the 1980s and recover some of the techniques used to visually communicate, only using text characters; no images, not fancy layouts, no desktop publishing software, just a text editor and plain text! The resulting fanzine will be both published on paper, using a dot-matrix printer (a popular 1980s type of printer) and as a web page.

Each will student/team be invited to create X number pages or text-characters. Which will be combined into 1 publication

Subjects

• introduction to fanzines (Kim)
• introduction to plain text internet: (Andre)

   * Bulletin Board System
   * IRC

• introduction to dot-matrix printer (Arjen)

Resources:

• texts repository:

** http://www.textfiles.com/

• ascii art generators
• banner creator http://patorjk.com/software/taag/
• ascii art galleries
  • http://www.chris.com/ascii/joan/www.geocities.com/SoHo/7373/index-2.html
  • http://www.asciiworld.com/
• images to ascii:
  • http://picascii.com/
  • http://www.text-image.com/convert/ascii.html

The plain text Internet.

Before the Wold Wide Web developed and gained populairty, the Internet was a text-based space. People across the network were interacting by using exclusively plain-text, no images, no text-formating. Yet users did not only communicate through written-language, they also used visual language. But how, this was a text-based medium?

One of the examples popular forms of communicating were the community "spaces", of Bulleting Board Systems and Internet Replay Chat

Links on BBS:

• Feb. 16, 1978: Bulletin Board Goes Electronic https://www.wired.com/2010/02/0216cbbs-first-bbs-bulletin-board/
• How Facebook – the Wal-Mart of the internet – dismantled online subcultures https://theconversation.com/how-facebook-the-wal-mart-of-the-internet-dismantled-online-subcultures-71536
• Bulletin Board Systems (BBS): the "internet" before the internet

http://www.paulmclellan.com/blog/2015/10/12/bulletin-board-systems-bbs-the-internet-before-the-internet

BBS Gallery

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/Koala_Country_BBS_Login_Screen.jpg/400px-Koala_Country_BBS_Login_Screen.jpg

https://www.docsplace.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/bbs-login-menu.jpg http://24.229.195.66:81/screens/pit.png

https://www.withfriendship.com/images/d/19603/bulletin-board-system-web.jpg http://spectrum.ieee.org/image/MjgyMzE0Mw.jpeg

http://ed.toton.org/bbs/images/sorcada2.ans.gif

https://www.docsplace.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/docs-fidonews-2nd-article.jpg

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