Back in the day, there was an extension to ANSI control codes called ANSI Music[1]. It borrowed the musical notation from IBM-BASIC's (and GW-BASIC) 'PLAY' statement. The standalone ANSIPLAY would play them back, or with the Telimate terminal emulator it'd play in the background while you used a BBS.<p>The last version of ANSIPLAY[2] was 2.1 I believe.<p>[1] <a href="http://artscene.textfiles.com/ansimusic/" rel="nofollow">http://artscene.textfiles.com/ansimusic/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://bbs.retropc.se/smmansi/00index.html" rel="nofollow">https://bbs.retropc.se/smmansi/00index.html</a>
"Which decade was best, and why was it the 80s"<p>Birth of Hip-Hop. New Wave. Electronic. Blondie. Michael Jackson's "Thriller", which echoes to this day in Justin Bieber's "Peaches". Metallica in their prime. Prince & the Revolution. Faith No More's Epic to close things out. And, of course, Rick Astley ;)<p>Recently heard Depeche Mode's "Black Celebration" for the first time in years and couldn't help but think it sounds better with age, better than anything today. Then a Bauhaus cover of Brian Eno's "Third Uncle" came on ...<p>Bauhaus - Third Uncle (1982)<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sILbx5xbwPY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sILbx5xbwPY</a>
I have a soft spot for ANSI art and secretly hope it has a reason to come back in a fresh way like pixel art has. The 1x2 blocks are just so iconic.<p>I fooled around making some tools to do stuff like parse a GIF of an ANSI back to ANSI and devolve a photo to (crummy) ANSI art the way some scripts do with ASCII, but it is pretty remedial compared to the code that exists for futzing with pixel art.