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Picking up from yesterday, we’re still celebrating the 21st anniversary of the BBS (bulletin board service) The Screaming Tomato (TST), the first WHQ (world headquarters) of Mistigris and a pretty groovy little place in cyberspace from 1994-1997. In our last post, we got to the conception and launch of the BBS by its SysOp (system operator) Nitnatsnoc and his bumbling visionary Co-SysOp Cthulu, and through to the creation of Mistigris. This account of “the early years” included an exclusive gallery of the self-publicising art for the BBS executed (perpetrated in my case) by its proprietors. Sure, that’s all well and good, but those guys hardly had an unbiased opinion…

In case you weren’t “there” then, a recap: a BBS was a computer-to-computer connection via phone line, moderated by modems (modulator-demodulators). After a banshee screech of the two pieces of equipment negotiating their “handshake”, users would be prompted to press Escape twice and proceed through to the login with a unique username and password, allowing them access (as fast, but no faster, as an adult can read) to designated areas of the SysOp’s computer sitting on the other end of the phone line. Through hot-keyed menus ([Y]es/[n]o) they could navigate a kind of way-station (the bulletin board analogy is not glib) where they could, generally one at a time, write messages to each other, share new files with others or help themselves to ones left behind by prior callers, play simple online games through BBS “door” programs, and enjoy live chat with the SysOp, if they were home. You enjoyed a limited number of minutes’ free access daily (supposing you were lucky enough to not just hit busy signals when you called!) and if that time was exceeded, you were unceremoniously kicked off. All this in textmode, with a screen resolution of 80x25 characters at 640x480 pixels, decorating things with ANSI art – generally with a kind of EGA colour scheme, mixing and matching from 16 viable foreground colours and 8 solid (and 8 blinking) background ones. But just like the MS-DOS command prompt, the default background was black. Your BBS experience may have differed in some superficial ways if you called boards on your Commodore 64 or your Apple Macintosh, but the general idea was the same – except that the artscene was resolutely ANSI-centric and PC-grounded, so the use of a terminal program to access one of these artscene boards was not entirely dissimilar to a session spent at the command prompt in MS-DOS or CP/M.

Unlike many BBSes, this one featured a mascot of sorts in its whimsical name (a refreshing breath of fresh air in a scene that was filled with teenaged boys trying to out-grim each other, cf. “Morbid Grindoris” – I don’t know what it is, but it’s grim all right!), and what’s more, it’s one that virtually anyone with two eyes and a finger could attempt to render in ANSI. Can I draw the Mona Lisa or a rocket ship? I don’t know – but I sure as heck can draw a tomato. Many artists from many different groups drew art to celebrate and promote this BBS, sometimes as a favour to us, sometimes because we asked them to, sometimes as a display of fealty to us, and sometimes just because our board’s name granted them a draught of strange inspiration, and today’s post compiles the ones who opted to include textmode renderings of that most vegetablian of fruits, the tomato. Often, screaming.

I wanted to touch briefly on the affiliations held by the board. Largely empty honours lavished upon boards, an affiliation could be used to trick others into believing that you were a big deal crossroads, and if you were lucky you could sit back and let the self-fulfilling prophecy take over… the artistic tributes would roll in because your BBS’ name had achieved the kind of stature and proportions that people simply expected to see in artpacks, over and over again, after seeing it hammered in repeatedly in lists of distro sites. (While by and large, the particular letters making up a BBS’ name probably didn’t contribute greatly to people’s decision to make art out of them, it didn’t hurt to make things easy for fontists by giving your board, if not a short name, an appealingly-abbreviatable one. It was all an exercise in branding.)

Our earliest ads (as in the first in this lot, by Darkforce briefly in Union between the downfall of iMPERiAL and the advent of Patriot->RAiD->Integrity) see us boasting ties to the local music groups EuphoniX, Digitallusions, and Happy Fetus Records, but I don’t believe we ever actually legitimately held any of those music distro site credits – that was a case of wishful thinking on my part, with intent to fake it until we made it. I mean, I’m on the record in one place, Issue #13 of the Kithe e-mag, saying that we definitely did hold them; I’m on the record elsewhere saying that we definitely didn’t. In at least one account I’m lying! The truth likely falls somewhere in between: sure I asked, but probably I was stymied.

The first legitimate affiliation held by the board was that of iMPERiAL Member site, courtesy of my somewhat underhanded membership in said group, but as noted … iMPERiAL dissolved before the board went public, so its utility as a feather in our cap was limited. In an attempt to bring his own membership of some group to the board, Nitnatsnoc very briefly held pre-Mist membership in a local (non-releasing, if memory serves correct) group named Sensation (SNS), one of Grateful Dead’s numerous failure-to-launch group aspirations… TST would have worn that dubious laurel, but he backed out quick after seeing the company he’d be keeping and, well, let us never speak of it again. Of course it quickly ascended to status as the WHQ of Mistigris (were there ever any real contenders? Atlantis and Alpha Centauri I remember were thriving local contemporary artscene hubs, though distinctly neutral territory), which got us far in receiving art from our members, but not much further in getting us art from non-members. Nit made a bit of a blunder accepting an IRC-offered distro site status from WiND, a new group which was to primarily make its mark accidentally releasing ripped ANSIs… and we must never speak of it again. The remaining affiliations were touches of genuine class: Fire BC outpost, on what basis I cannot recall (consolation prize for the disappointingly temporary nature of their merger with Mistigris in 0395?); Integrity Member site, a difficult-to-obtain honor from a hot group that had no non-member board distro sites; ACID Member site, the logical follow-up to Integrity’s merger into ACID, and finally the strangest of our affiliations, WHQ of Cenobite, one of the artscene’s very few “lit”-exclusive groups (the canonical three were Revolt, Reality and Candelabra) – a distinction perhaps only possible in a place where poetry and writers were already so extraordinarily celebrated as the WHQ of Mistigris, the group that published by far the best of the artscene poetry… that nobody in the artscene read. Mistigris survived the end of TST, but it was a fatal blow that Cenobite never recovered from.

OK, so what else do we have here? An offputting (ugh, the eyebrows!) tomato menu, screaming with rage, by Pestilence’s pet ANSI artist Inquisitor – very briefly of Mistigris; a more jubilantly hollering tomato by Estatic of CiA, the long-running “#3” group which often rated lower, but outlasted all other contenders; a shrunken-head interpretation of a tomato (looks more like an onion painted red) by Destro of Mist; Egoteq’s outraged tomato from an iCE pack, garnering us some legitimacy by getting our little project mentioned in the perennial #2 group; blink-and-you’ll-miss-them ASCII tomators in this logo by Feral of Trance (which looked even better in Amiga mode, but which kept glitching when I tried saving it that way in Pablo – try it yourself!); Happyfish’s straightforward explanation of just what it is that makes the (cherry) tomato scream?; a tomater hiding in the red background of Zoltar’s font accompanying Eerie’s drawing of a blue troll; cutie tomatoes cowering on either side of Mavrik’s logo accompanying his ANSI of Image comics character Pitt; and an ANSI of a cool dude tomato wearing a suit, a branching-out experiment by Dead Soul of Mistigris (where the rest of those unallocated pictures were released) who typically drew ASCII rather than ANSI … and … there are 13 more ANSIs of tomatoes I have here made for our board, realizing I must have just run up against some sort of internal Tumblr limit. Maybe I’ll just follow up this post venting the rest of them without all of the drainingly exhaustive commentary… Stay tuned, there are more coming!