Recycling ANSI art: Tracing the origins of Fire Escape's BBS logon screens

Fire Escape, a prominent St. Louis BBS directory curator, launched her own board, Fire Escape’s BBS Directory HQ, in late 1992. Its identity was reinforced through flame-colored graphics and a striking ladder-out-of-fire logo, but callers also saw a rotating selection of 18 welcome screens, including playful images of Snoopy and a computer room. A later investigation of the surviving screen archive traces many of these images to earlier “public domain” ANSI art, showing how widely BBS operators recycled and adapted graphics rather than always creating new ones.

The comparisons reveal how reuse worked: Fire Escape cropped images to fit the shorter display area, often removing artists’ signatures, then added board information or modified details. Her Joe Cool Snoopy screen derives from Lora Ruffner’s 1990 drawing; a computer-using Snoopy came from Michael C. Ling’s work and gained extra wires, equipment, and a speech balloon. The mushroom-cloud image began as TS’s 1987 “ESCAPE.ANS,” was recast as a Gulf War greeting in 1990, and became an anti-nuclear “STOP” image in 1995 before a more elaborate version appeared on Fire Escape’s board. A computer-room scene similarly traces to an advertisement for Atlanta’s Lion’s Den BBS in 1988 and was adapted by another sysop. Together, the examples show that ANSI art circulated across boards and purposes, with cropping and customization obscuring its origins.