[jzzskijj]

This made me chuckle:

> Please don't be tempted to use fancy graphic or ANSI sequences in the FILE_ID.DIZ file, as most BBS software will not allow this, and will render your FILE_ID.DIZ file useless.

Everyone was doing exactly that and even I did something like +hundred artsy file_id.diz headers for the scene groups or my own groups. When "releases" started to be from 5 to 15 disks (packages), many sysops started to clearing the art away from the file lists and just leaving an oneliner of the title visible, like:

   The Name of The Release       Disk: [03/12]

Interesting too that as niche as they are today, they are still being made. The last ones I did was in 2015.

[alkonaut]

I was adult years old when I realized all those big walls of gibberish I saw in my youth was intended to be elaborate graphics, but my computer had the wrong charset to show them.

[jzzskijj]

Huh! Which system you were using? Notepad in Windows or Linux?

[cesarb]

I would guess MS-DOS. Back then, there was no UTF-8, and the character encoding depended on your language. People using English normally were using CP437 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP437), while people using other languages would be using something like CP850 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP850). Take a look at the encoding tables in these two articles, and notice that CP437 has lots of line and box drawing characters in the high half, while CP850 replaces many of them with accented letters.

If the file was written on a system using CP437, and used these line/box drawing characters, then someone on a system using CP850 would see random letters where the author intended fancy boxes around their text.

(This was due to a limitation of the text modes used to run MS-DOS: each character on the 80x25 fixed-size grid shown on the screen was described in memory by a single byte which was a index into the font table, plus another byte for attributes like color and intensity. That means there could be at most 256 distinct characters, and no way to combine separate characters into one. To add all the accented letters necessary for many languages, something had to be removed; and what was removed were the less important line and box drawing characters. That is very different from the graphical modes common nowadays, which store the color of each pixel separately in memory, and allow infinite variation on the character shapes.)

[alkonaut]

Dos and later Windows. Unsure which code pages were used but this was in Sweden.

[jzzskijj]

> Unsure which code pages were used but this was in Sweden.

Interesting. Every PC I ever used in Finland (home, school, friend's, etc.) were always using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437 and I would have assumed every PC in Sweden did too. Maybe your did have cp850 or something uncommon.

[blackhaz]

Hehe. Here's a cool FILE_ID.DIZ collection: http://www.roysac.com/fileid_col.html

[nuancebydefault]

Real nice ascii art collection!

[jasonfarnon]

When "releases" started to be from 5 to 15 disks

I can remember this, scrolling through page after page of the same release since only 3 or 4 big "PWA" or "FLT" logos could fit on a page. I remember more or less the same visual style as graffiti from the era. I had no idea this stuff was still happening in 2015.

[jzzskijj]

This stuff is still happening even today :-)

http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/release.php?id=107478 for example this 2024 release, if you scroll to the end of the page.