Russian ASCII Art Animated Cat From 1968 125
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."
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
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Uuum, I don’t want to sink your boat, but how can you steal, if everyone owns everything? ;)
(And well, you can’t steal movies at all, actually. It’s physically impossible.)
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HAHAHA 4chan jokes! Oh my god they're so original! Please bring us so much more of your witty fresh and mature humour!
Obligitory "The internt is made of cats" (Score:1)
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Fact 1: The internet is made of cats.
Fact 2: On the internet no one can tell you're a dog.
Who can reconcile this for me?
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I won't say "Get off my lawn!" but there was a time when ASCII art was regarded by the cognoscenti as totally cool. I remember having an ASCII rendering of the Mona Lisa on 14/11" fanfold on the wall of my machine room back in the '70s...
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Apparently we have to take your word regarding the second sentence there having something to do with the first?
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ASCII art is one of these things that has been around since the dawn of telecommunications and just won't go away. There's always groups of people who think it's cool. Jason Scott (of textfiles [textfiles.com] fame) as a nice video [vimeo.com] (actually about porn in the computer age) that shows fine examples of early ASCII and typewriter art.
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The problem with ascii animation is that typing that fast kills your wrists.
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Since the dawn of typewriters, too. I had endless fun with my mom's Facit portable back in the days.
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More than just the cognoscenti. My parents have an ASCII-art 'photo' of my sisters and me, from (I think) the late 70s. I think I remember them getting it from a photographer with a booth in a mall. I'll have to try to find it, I'm curious to know what year that actually was.
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...lolcats turn 42.
They're a lot older than that [flickr.com].
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And the captioned photo form - WITH THE CAPTION BEING SOMETHING THAT THE CAT IS "SAYING" (pretty much the definition of modern lolcats) - predates even your link: http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/12/01/funny-pictures-oldest-ever-lolcat-found/ [icanhascheezburger.com]
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Cool trivia! Thanks. :)
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Indeed they are, but you wouldn't be able to tell by these fakes; you've been had. Check the other response for a true 1905 lolcat.
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ASCII? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:ASCII? (Score:5, Funny)
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po-RUSSKII !
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What do tits have to do with this?
PS: A-SCIISKI, sounds a lot like "What about the tits?".
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Russian surnames don't end with -ski. Polish ones do (See info on Sikorsky or Polanski). R-77 should be caller amraamov. Then it would look Russian.
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Vasily Klyuchevsky is not Russian. Born in imperial Russia, ethnic Mordvinian. He is not even not from Indoeuropean language family.
Wassily Kandinsky article on wikipedia does not provide personal details. Born in imperial Russia, but might be closer to Ukrainians (childhood in Odessa)
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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.
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I'm rather partial to 'russkij', myself.
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You see Russian words ending in "ski" all the time. The Russian word for "Russian" is often latinized as "Russki".
There isn't really a standard way to transliterate Russian Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet that we use; or rather, there are multiple standards that reflect the phonetic biases of the people who invented the standards.
My own last name is a case in point. In Russian, it's spelled "". (Oops, Slashdot doesn't like Cyrillic. Full post here [picknit.com]). I spell it "Rabinovitch", my grandfather spelled it witho
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Sorry about the bad link in the above post. Still learning how blog software works. Try:
http://picknit.com/mt4/isaac/a-slashdot-post-that-wasnt.html [picknit.com]
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Slavs that use both alphabets figured this out a long time ago, though.
In Serbian, there are two 'ch's, so somewhat unlike Russian. I think in Russian, the Serbian soft ch is like a Russian "ch" with a soft sign behind it. Anyway, names that end in -itch sound, like.. Mirkovic, or Ivan Ivanovic (Ivanovitch) use this soft character in south Slavic languages; In Latin alphabet they have exact analog character - there is one for all Serbian cyrillic letters (HR and parts of BiH use this latin alphabet exclusiv
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If you can't live with ambiguity, I suggest you avoid communicating with humans.
I find it more practical to live with the fact that language is an evolving entity. That means:
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Transliteration has nothing to do with the evolution of language though. We're not talking about a dialects here. Transliteration is a hack to represent something written in another language, compensating for the characters that don't exist in the language you're transliterating to.
It is very desirable for it to be accurate, because when for instance you emigrate from Russia to the US, you don't want your name to be written differently in every document and database, as that can result in a considerable bue
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Transliteration has nothing to do with the evolution of language though. We're not talking about a dialects here. Transliteration is a hack to represent something written in another language, compensating for the characters that don't exist in the language you're transliterating to.
You're oversimplifying. Recall that there isn't a simple obvious correspondence between letters and sounds. There are complications and ambiguities in every written language, and English has more than its share. And that has everything to do with the way language evolves.
It is very desirable for it to be accurate, because when for instance you emigrate from Russia to the US, you don't want your name to be written differently in every document and database, as that can result in a considerable bueraucratic mess.
I won't deny that having everybody use the same simple, consistent system of transliteration between English and Russian would be desirable. I just deny that it's possible. Not unless you have some kind of magic mind control ray that will f
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Mind? I suspect that you may have had a mind at some distant time in the past. But, today, you have no idea if your mind works or not. It disowned you, and left.
And, you probably thought you just lost your mind, right?
Re:ASCII? (Score:5, Funny)
however, in ascii-art ASCII is an abbriviation of "Abnormal String of Characters Is the Image"
Re:ASCII? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:ASCII? (Score:5, Interesting)
A few ephemera:
ASCII wasn't widely used until after 1967, when it underwent a major revision. It is worth noting that the Soviet Union variously purchased, reverse-engineered and stole computer designs as early as the sixties, and when they did so, they frequently brought the charsets with them to maintain program compatibility with American and Western European software.
...however, most of that reverse-engineering happened only later, and I for one would be surprised if ASCII was used at all in Russian computing prior to the availability of Usenet and IBM PC clones.
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 ;)
Highly informative (Score:2)
And correct.
Too bad I have no points to give today.
Molodets.
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Two letters missing ? I would say only the "IO" letter is missing and it is usually written as a "IE" anyway.
The hard sign is just a bit hidden.
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I would say only the "IO" letter is missing
Isn't $75 the IO? Or am I misunderstanding?
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Manual chapter: external devices [googlecode.com] code table is on PDF page 13
Machine command poster [googlecode.com] Printer self-test output is at the top of page 2
BESM-4 is M-220 and M-20 compatible. M-20 was released to production in 1958.
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Since ASCII stands for "American" Standard Code for Information Interchange
You've got it all wrong. It stands for "American Society of Cat Illustration Innovation," informally known as the LOL Society.
Pictures or it didn't happen! (Score:2)
I tried and failed.
Can someone please post a more direct link? (or possibly just the ascii)
aren't we all tired of looking for the article in a link in the article in a link in the article in a...
Re:Pictures or it didn't happen! (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O4mm3hXNgA [youtube.com]
As a proud old schooler from [iCE]... I say... (Score:2)
AWESOME.
That's nothing! (Score:5, Funny)
Agreed. (Score:3, Funny)
Impressive would have been two consecutive hits on the cat with a railgun...
Re:That's nothing! (Score:4, Funny)
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This is the sound of the joke going over your head [ufos-aliens.co.uk].
If you were into the ascii art scene or BBSs (Score:2, Interesting)
The guy interviewed Vinton Cerf and Philip J. Kaplan for it, amongst others you will likely recognize.
http://www.archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary [archive.org]
iirc, part 5 was all about the ascii art scene.
Rotoscoped. (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.asciimation.co.nz/ [asciimation.co.nz] - The classic ASCII anim of Episode IV.
Re:Rotoscoped. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, we all know that the ASCII animation of Episode IV was made before 1968.
What next? Are you going to point out that The Mother of all Demos [wikipedia.org] is crap because you can do better things now?
Not really ascii art (Score:1)
The animation is interesting, but it's not really ASCII art. Not as I define it. ASCII art in my books is using the particular characteristics (shape & density) of many different alphanumeric characters and symbols together to make an image. This is just the same character repeated over and over. Whether or not the animation of the outline was "rotoscoped" from a real cat, the ASCII part was certainly "rotoscoped" from a conventional animation and simply filled in with a letter. It could have been
Re:Rotoscoped. (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't rotoscoped. You can see the skeletonized cat toward the middle of the video. You can also make out some cracks where the different components meet at the joints.
Re:Rotoscoped - to coin Einstein (Score:2)
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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]
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The best way to do it is telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
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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.
Pin registration (Score:2)
I think this is very fun, but it looks like they could have used some help from basic understanding of pin registration. The animations are awesome. The jumpiness of some of it is not.
Printer (Score:5, Funny)
Did anyone else think of... (Score:5, Funny)
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Endut! Hoch Hech!
The cat starved to death (Score:1)
See that? First pass he was cool. On the second, he was all skinny and shit. Third pass was the ghost. Call the ASPCA!
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See that? First pass he was cool. On the second, he was all skinny and shit. Third pass was the ghost. Call the ASPCA!
Well, its wasn't their fault. They just didn't know what to feed an ASCII (or the Soviet equivalent of) cat.
Reverse engineering (Score:1)
42 years ago... (Score:4, Funny)
How were the images generated? (Score:1)
Not NEWS? (Score:2)
Text art has been around for a long time. Typewriter art for over 100 years. RTTY art nearly as long. The principles of animation have been understood for a while. Why is this news?
Mad Magazine - PDP 7 (Score:1)
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A
H
H
I
(imagine it in Courier
A few years later I had a BASIC programming class, and when we finally got a few CRTs (to replace the printout only outputs we had previously) one of the first things I did, now that things could really "move"!, was to write a program to make this Ascii rocket take off! I remember showing it off to others in
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A
H
H
I
(imagine it in Courier ...)
Perhaps code tags would help?
A
H
H
I
Not quite, lines are too far apart.
Russians and ASCII (Score:1)
Russians? 1968? ASCII? Really??
The printer sucked (Score:2)
Flash? (Score:3, Insightful)
Reminds me of a certain expensive pen...
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> Reminds me of a certain expensive pen...
...that is an urban legend to begin with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen
ASCII Art is NOT dead!!!! (Score:2)
There is an ASCII screen saver and it is hella cool! Get it hear [robobunny.com] for Mac and KDE and maybe windows, I didn't look that hard.
Not quite the same, but... (Score:2)
How many of us did a similar "brief animation project" in BASIC on an Apple II, TI-99/4A, or Coleco for a 7th-12th grade project back in the early to mid 80's?
Granted, it wasn't on paper, but still... I did a four minute graphic story on an Apple II in 8th grade back in ... math math years .. 1983ish that this reminded me of.
Not my fault the dirty reds were 15 years ahead of me. These guys were all PhDs and shit.
Still got an A... bah.
Trojan (Score:2)
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