Blog

  • VT100 Animations

    Our ibiblio files include some of these neat VT100 animations (https://www.ibiblio.org/catalog/items/show/3566)  that were made in the 1980’s and early 1990’s for the VT100 terminals . The animations were created by writing code that instructs characters to appear on the screen in a specific order and time. Nothing fancy, but fun to watch. 

    Assuming you don’t have a functioning VT100 terminal laying around to run these on, the next best thing is to run this in a Linux terminal using this pipe viewer , and this code:

    curl -s [URL] | pv -q -L 2000

    (thanks ).  Replace that url with any from ibiblio’s vt100 collection here:  http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/multimedia/animation/vt100-animation/ .  Example:

    curl -s ibiblio.org/pub/multimedia/animation/vt100-animation/dont-worry.vt | pv -q -L 2000 

    If you don’t have a Linux terminal you can run the code in your Mac terminal, leaving off the ‘|’ and everything after. The timing will be too fast, but you can see what it does. If you have Windows you can install a Linux app from the Microsoft store to run these.

    You can find more .vt animation here: http://artscene.textfiles.com/vt100/

  • Reading Suggestions from Paul Jones

    If you find yourself with some extra time on your hands head on over to Project Gutenberg and check out these suggested plague readings. Project Gutenbuerg offers over 60,000 free e-books in various formats.

    “Project Gutenberg has a large selection of plague related titles for free download, including The Decameron (Boccaccio), Journal of the Plague Year (DeFoe), The Scarlet Plague (Jack London), The Last Man (Mary Shelley), Plague of Pythons (Frederik Pohl), Plague Ship (Andre Norton), History of Epidemics of Britain (2 volumes) and my favorite “The Virtue and Use of Coffee With Regard to the Plague and Other Infectious”
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=plague

  • Icon Browswer

    Before emojis, memes, gifs, or even photos on the internet, there were icons. Enjoy this icon browser circa 1994-1995.
    http://www.ibiblio.org/gio/iconbrowser/