Russian ASCII Art Animated Cat From 1968 125
Posted
by
timothy
from the doing-it-the-hard-way dept.
from the doing-it-the-hard-way dept.
harrymcc writes "Forty-two years ago, Russian scientists created an impressive sequence of a cat walking about — and it was all the more impressive given that the 'CGI' involved rendering hundreds of images of the cat as ASCII art, then printing out the sequence image by image and photographing it."
Re:Pictures or it didn't happen! (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O4mm3hXNgA [youtube.com]
Re:ASCII? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Rotoscoped. (Score:4, Informative)
You can also do this with mplayer if compiled with the right libs.
http://oreilly.com/pub/h/4441 [oreilly.com]
Re:ASCII? (Score:5, Informative)
The "images" were created using the BESM-4 computer. The much more widely used BESM-6 used 48 bit words and you can see its character encoding table here:
http://www.mailcom.com/besm6/encoding_ru.html [mailcom.com]
The BESM-4 had 45-bit words and I'm not sure what encoding it used, but it's likely to be the same or similar to the above. Note how that character table has math operators like logical conjucntion/disjunction even but lacks an exclamation mark and even two letters of the Russian alphabet. Wasn't exactly meant for word processing ;)
Re:ASCII? (Score:1, Informative)
Unless you mean -sky rhyming with pie, no. There's no standard for romanization of Russian. The word for "russian [language]" would usually be transliterated russkiy.
Re:Rotoscoped. (Score:3, Informative)
I think you misunderstand what rotoscoping [wikipedia.org] is. This is just plan "animation", where you use a rostrum camera [wikipedia.org] to transfer your frames from paper to film. The difference here is that the frames themselves were computer generated. I'd be very curious to know whether they actually had some kind of animation software, or just used a text editor.
Re:Flash? (Score:2, Informative)
> Reminds me of a certain expensive pen...
...that is an urban legend to begin with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen