Welcome to a fan webpage celebrating deprecated, MS-DOS-era versions of the venerable ANSI art editing program PabloDraw!I know, PabloDraw already has a homepage, so why is this one necessary? OK, "necessary" might be overstating the case, but preserving computing history on this level is so inexpensive, one might as well ask... why not?? As PabloDraw was initially a Mistigris product long before becoming a dominant application (because every group had a dedicated ANSI viewer program -- eg. Minus' MistView in our case -- but how many could boast their own ANSI editor?), old versions of the program have charming and delicious Mist Classic fingerprints all over them, from changelogs documenting features requested and bug reports made by such retired historical ANSI artscene personages as Nitnatsnoc, Happyfish, Mavrik and The Extremist, to interface art -- until now, exclusively available in-app -- from the above and further such venerable blockstackers as Tincat, Quip and Eerie. You won't see these screens in their artscene career portfolios on 16colo.rs, and that alone makes these programs worthy of preservation and study! (And of course, we were also first in line to start hyping and promoting this little app that could!) ( ... It's neat to see Eto having such items as "- TCP/IP support - more than one person drawing at same time" on the program's to-do list back in the 20th century, dreams that would ultimately be realised, but only after ... quite some delay.)
It's also a good excuse to tell some interesting stories about the historical development of PabloDraw, such as were formerly present in its (now-former) Wikipedia article (now mirrored at GitHub) (making it by some metric the most notable aspect of Mist Classic's entire tenure!), such as its origins not at the desk of long-time developer Eto, but Minus (aka Norman Yen aka Godzilla, Fred Flintstone, the Xtortionist, 1000 Miles, Nuclear Waste) of Mistigris and C64 crew Ballistics, SysOp of Infinite Dreams (aka Fast & Furious) BBS, 1:153/7042... whose activities don't just include the C64 game Dual Block Drop in 1990 but SNES Assembler utilities in 1993 and 95 and a full-blown music disk for the SNES in late 1996... (but enough about Minus!) ... and Pablo's brief graduation to an officially supported product of the major-league ANSI art concerns ACiD and iCE right as ANSI art reached peak irrelevance, even in their artpacks! (Let's not be overly harsh, however -- a peek at Waybackmachine mirrors of its website during the years in the oughts during which ANSI art was well and truly lost in the wilderness reveals that his intermediary stages of this seemingly difficult-to-justify-the-effort-working-on project nonetheless garnered downloads in quantities in excess of tens of thousands. It seems that just because there were few BBSes to demonstrate ANSI art to callers and virtually no artpacks being released during this period doesn't mean that people weren't still acquiring the tool and, presumably, trying it out! It's hopeful, in a way.)
If you like the MS-DOS versions of PabloDraw, you might enjoy some other also-ran MS-DOS-era ANSI art editors: Empathy, ArtworkX, Tundradraw, CIADraw, DarkDraw (recently re-entering the ring!), ITPDraw, PaintPro, ShmANSI, TetraDraw, ANSIDraw, AMProsoft's ANSInator, and of course TheDraw and ACiDDraw. As of 2024, recent exciting developments in the field of ANSI art editors include IcyDraw and DurDraw. [Contact us!] We talk about cyberspace and area codes, but Mistigris activities are coordinated out of the ancestral, traditional and unceded territories of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) and səlil̓wətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Sníchim-speaking Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation), the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓- and Halq’eméylem-speaking Stó:lō peoples and the ceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking sc̓əwaθən (Tsawwassen) Nation. |
