A 1990s St. Louis BBS cropped its borrowed ANSI logon screens to 17 lines and cut off the artists' signatures, and Josh Renaud traced them back

Watercolour of Chris Pirillo at an old beige computer, holding a pair of scissors over a glowing screen of blocky flame art, a snipped strip with a scribbled signature drifting away. — Illustration: LockerGnome

Fire Escape was already famous in the 314 area code before she ran a board of her own. She kept “Fire Escape’s St. Louis BBS Directory,” the monthly list of every bulletin board in town, and Boardwatch called it “one of the most accurate and detailed bulletin board lists in the world.” In late 1992 she and her then-husband put up Fire Escape’s BBS Directory HQ, FEHQ, and it became one of the most popular boards in the city.

She went all in on the theme. Flames, mushroom clouds, red and yellow everywhere. She also wanted variety, so the board picked a logon screen at random from 18 of them. Josh Renaud, who writes Break Into Chat (@kirkman), was No. 9 on her leaderboard for most calls, and in the mid-2000s she mailed him an archive of every ANSI screen she’d used.

The cropping is where the credits went. “Terminal screens ranged from 23-25 rows tall, but Fire Escape cropped each of her logon images much tighter, restricting them to 16-17 lines max,” Renaud writes. “One side effect of cropping is that artist signatures or attribution were often removed.”

Her Snoopy-as-Joe-Cool screen started as a 1990 piece by Lora Ruffner, who drew as “Ebony Eyes” and signed “[EE].” The original was taller (“Snoopy had legs!”). Her other Snoopy, typing on a computer on top of his doghouse, came from Michael C. Ling, who signed “MCL.” Fire Escape’s version added more wires and a thought balloon: “Yipeeeee!! I finally got through!”

The mushroom cloud has the best paper trail. The oldest copy Renaud found is a file named ESCAPE.ANS, drawn in 1987 by an artist who signed “TS,” five years before FEHQ existed, with the word ESCAPE in big block letters under the blast. Yes, the board named Fire Escape ended up with art from a file literally called ESCAPE. An unknown artist animated it for the Gulf War in 1990 as SADDAM.ANS, and in 1995 someone called Kung Fu Tzu swapped ESCAPE for STOP. Who gave Fire Escape’s version its gray cloud and better shading is still unknown.

The pet shop was a computer store. Violet Stymacks drew DESKTOP.ANS in 1991 for Desktop Micro’s BBS in Bloomington, Illinois. Fire Escape told Renaud she had “adapted existing art,” but also that she “was not that talented,” and the swap was done well. Renaud’s theory is that Stymacks reworked her own store into a pet shop for some other board, the way she turned a cookie shop into a file shop. She’d go through Fidonet node lists, find a board with a good name, draw a screen to fit its theme and send it to the sysop. By late 1990 she said 500 boards were using her work, and Boardwatch reported in 1993 that the number had tripled. Renaud has found more than 1,100 of her pieces. He still hasn’t found the pet shop, and he only has 66 of the 79 or more collections she put out.

Fire Escape never asked anybody. “I figured if anyone had an issue, I’d just remove the screen,” she told him. “But no one ever said anything about it.”

Why it matters

A trim did the erasing. Ruffner’s Snoopy was nearly empty except for her “[EE],” which made it easy to fill with a board’s details, and Renaud figures that’s why sysops liked screens like it. Cut a screen down to 17 lines to make that room and the signature goes with the rows, without anyone deciding to drop it.

The scene’s own people couldn’t agree on the rules. Patrick Grote, a freelance writer who published collections of ANSI art gathered from public message boards in 1990, said it was a “Tough call” whether people could change the screens, and he’d leave anything marked “(C)” alone. In 2001 a sysop was still telling another to just modify existing collections.

Now the trail can be walked back. Renaud’s tracing runs on archived shareware CDs searchable file by file, scanned Boardwatch issues and a sysop who kept her files for twenty years. Remove any one of those and the “TS” mushroom cloud is anonymous forever.

The same cropping happens every day now, just faster. A repost crops the watermark, a thumbnail crops the byline, an upload strips the metadata, and a picture moves on without the name on it. Renaud’s method still works on those. Find the oldest copy in the archives, and here the oldest copies still carried the marks: [EE], MCL, TS, VS.

The open question is the one Renaud ends on. Did Ruffner, Ling and Stymacks want their screens remixed? They gave them away to be seen. Nobody asked them about being cut.

Steal this

Sign where the crop can’t reach. When you make anything people will drop into their own layout (a diagram, a slide template, an icon set), put your name somewhere inside the image that a trim won’t reach, and in the file’s metadata too. This is like writing your name inside the lunchbox lid instead of on the sticker that peels off.
Search for the original before you reuse “public domain” art. Take a filename or a distinctive line of text and look it up in Discmaster or the Internet Archive, then credit whoever drew the oldest copy. Kind of like checking the tag inside a thrift-store jacket before you call it vintage.
If you trim someone’s work to fit, put the credit back in your text. Fire Escape filled the freed-up space with her board’s details; one short “art: VS” line in that space would have kept the trail. This is like a cover band telling the crowd whose song it is.

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