ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

A Thousand Seven Hundred RTTY Memories —

I had written about the passing of John Sheetz some entries back. This story has a nice (if not, of course, happy) coda. First of all, his widow and children have now recieved copies of the documentary and the original full one-hour interview, which itself is on archive.org and which started off the massive BBS Documentary Interview collection.

I had talked about how concerned I was that Mr. Sheetz had all this artwork, scads and scads of it, and what had happened to it. My mentioning of his name and callsign got the attention of a number of Greenkeys members, including a couple who pointed me to Doug Nelson, who had copies of a lot of RTTY artworks, on floppy and then transferred to CD.

A lot.

A whole lot.

So it is with great happiness I can now announce that artscene.textfiles.com now has over 1,700 pieces of RTTY art, dating from the 50s to last decade. Some good amount of these have not been easily available online before. Some are the original artworks that were then transferred to ASCII and traded on bulletin board systems as if they were new, when many of them preceded BBSes by years. It is a spectacular collection, and I had little to do with its collecting and saving; that was the work of many others, hams who collected these neat little drawings and holiday greetings and which now I hope will bloom on a thousand screens and terminals.


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