Figlet

Did you know that walking around barefooted on mulch, while innocuous-seeming enough, is actually a stupid idea? Did you know that shards of wood can stab you clean through the bottom of the foot? I didn't. Learn from my mistakes.

In the early Nineties, when computers were still very much for the nerdy masses only, the phrase "open source content" was almost redundant. If a neat little program was in demand, someone just wrote it up and gave it out to the other nerds, who would modify it as their needs dictated. In our current social climate, this end-user culture (I coined that), people don't want to have to write programming. They want to pay an ambiguous third-party conglomerate and have everything they need at their fingertips. This is not by any means a bad thing; it is however, a little sad. The computer has ceased to be a magic box where only the eccentrically devoted need apply; it now frequents the most unlikely of places, even (ye gods) my grandmother's house. True, I think she only has dial-up, but still.

The moral of the story is Figlet. The program was written in 1991 by Glenn Chappell. Its first incarnation was 170 lines of C code, where you would input a phrase and an ASCII signature would pop out. That's what Figlet does, you see. It writes words better than you can. For instance, the first font ever written was "Standard".

Since then, the program has expanded to its current library of hundreds of fonts. Fonts like Bulbhead.

Or Broadway KB.

Everything from the uninspired Digital

to the oh-so-impressive Calligraphy.

You ca see all of the current fonts at this rather attractive front-end GUI. You can change everything from the color to the number of fonts displayed. It also has the more-professionally done AOL Macro fonts, ones that look like this.

Have fun.