My son was talking about making some ASCII art in Python and I mentioned the ANSI art I had seen. This was while I briefly worked at a DEC-based company in the mid-1990s. It showed a Christmas tree in color (VT240) with blinking tree lights and so forth. I seem to remember there being gifts under the tree.
I went looking for it in google, and while it turns up a bunch, none of them look right. Most are very simple cones for the tree, like this one, and I seem to recall this one being “more realistic” and a sort of standard that was passed around the DEC shops every year.
It’s not the one that EdS posted a while back, it was in color and I don’t recall a train (but perhaps I just forgot it?)
Not ringing a bell with me, but maybe search Usenet (in the form of Google Groups)? Maybe with Regis or sixel search terms?
Not the results you seek, but for possible interest I found this and this.
From the first
This posting, from the “Merry Christmas, NetLand!” line above, to the final “Th-th-th-that’s all, folks!” at the end, should comprise 399 lines; if after removing headers you don’t get that many lines, some of this posting has been lost.
I actually implemented the Christmas tree at a client site in Canada. I don’t know if it is the same one you are remembering, but I do know it got propagated to a couple of other sites in Canada and Europe (France specifically)
I did it by hand, using the TPU editor and entering in the escape sequences manually.
