The world wide web, as a bulletin board
bbs.dbhq.uk is a bulletin board system that fronts the live web. Give it an address and it fetches the page, throws away the script, the tracking and the layout, and redraws what is left as 16-colour CP437 text on a 132-column screen, the way a board looked in 1992.
An ANSI and ASCII art generator, built in
Every photograph on a page is converted to ANSI art on the way past. The converter chooses a glyph, a foreground colour and a background colour for each cell together, scoring the result against the original in a perceptual colour space, so a face comes out recognisable rather than as a grey smear. It picks sixteen colours for each individual picture from the 262,144 a VGA card could produce, which is what the XBIN format was invented for in 1996.
The converter has a page of its own if that is what you came for: drop in a photograph and get ASCII or 16-colour ANSI art back, without it being uploaded anywhere.
Reading the web without JavaScript
Nothing a page ships is executed. The board reads the HTML a server sends, works out what it means from its landmarks and headings, and throws the rest away. Pages that build themselves entirely with JavaScript come back empty, which is reported honestly rather than hidden: a measured corpus of fifty real pages records how many render readably. It is about seven in ten.
Classic ANSI art
The board reads .ANS files, so the art scene's own work
displays as it was drawn, including the SAUCE record naming the artist.
The ANSI Art Archive at textfiles.com is on the board's curated list.
How it is built
The renderer is Rust compiled to WebAssembly and runs entirely on your machine. A small Cloudflare Worker relays page fetches, because a browser cannot request another site directly; it returns bytes and never decides how anything looks. The board runs at 132x50 in an 8x16 cell, which is VESA text mode 10Bh. The source is on GitHub.
The sysop
Daniel Grimes
Director of DBHQ Consulting Ltd and a Fractional Engineering Lead, working across defence, banking, insurance, energy, commodities, healthcare and identity.
This board is a DBHQ experiment: a serious renderer wearing a 1992 costume. Its sister project is modem.dbhq.uk.