The History of Figlet
“Why does FIGlet exist?”
# - a brief history of FIGlet
written by Glenn in 1995
In Spring 1991, inspired by the e-mail signature of Frank Sheeran and goaded on by my good friend Ian Chai, I (Glenn Chappell) wrote a nifty little 170-line C'' program I called newban’’. In hindsight, we now call it ``FIGlet 1.0’’, and in various incarnations it circulated around the net for a couple of years. It had one font, which included only lower-case letters.
In early 1993, Ian decided newban was due for a few changes, so we added the full ASCII set, to start with. First, though, Ian had to find me a copy of the source, since I had tossed it away as not worth the disk space. We discussed what could be done with it, decided on a general re-write, and, 7 months later, ended up with 888 lines of code, 13 fonts and documentation. This was FIGlet 2.0, the first real release.
^^*FIGlet in action*^^
To my great surprise, figlet seems to have taken the net by storm. We receive ``FIGlet is great!’’ messages all the time (thanx, everyone!) and a new contributed font about once a week. To handle all the traffic, Ian quickly set up a mailing list, Daniel Simmons kindly offered us space for an FTP site, several people volunteered to port figlet to non-Unix operating systems, … and bug reports poured in.
Because of these, and the need to make figlet more ``international’’, we released a new version of figlet that could handle non-ASCII character sets and right-to-left printing. This was FIGlet 2.1, which, in a couple of weeks, became FIGlet 2.1.1. This last weighed in at 1314 lines, and we had over 60 fonts. (And as of this writing, we have 142.)