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/