Over the past few years, I've always been fascinated with animations, cartoons and Rube Goldberg machines. Just this week, I was taking a look at a crazy thing I never knew was possible: animations in the terminal. This was mind blowing to me, and this filled me with excitement and fervor to create an animated Rube Goldberg machine in the terminal.

The Rube Goldberg machine is a machine that does a simple task, but in an unnecessarily complicated way. The program executed in the demo shows a Rube Goldberg machine of a ball, dominoes, and an anvil. The ball hits the dominoes and the anvil and both fall down. The task is simply to show the silliness of animations carried out by the anvil and dominoes. You can see, it does the task pretty well in the end.

Grabbing inspiration from VT100 terminal animations back in the 1970s, I took a look at the source code of them and found simple instructions for the terminal to move the cursor from one place to another. This was fascinating stuff, there were so many modes and things one could do in the terminal to display graphics and etc. Every ascii graphic you see in the demo is handmade and appears as seen in the source code.