LOVE ASCII ART from old school computing days, ASCII has been around for quite some time! I remember first seeing it way back in ancient times (also known as my high school computer class – I was a total geek then too lol). The nostalgic feeling and excitement you get when you see ASCII art is pretty awesome – it definitely brings back some good memories. I can remember trying to piece stuff together long before those ASCII art generators were around. Ever download a software program or go to an old school angelfire site and find some truly epic ASCII Art and you thought whoever made it was just the coolest person ever? I used to actually judge how good a software tool would be by how cool the ASCII art was hahaha sad I know (am I the only one who did that?). Anyway, some people might now know what exactly ASCII is – they have probably seen it but maybe not sure what it was called.
What is ASCII Art?
Basically ASCII Art is art created purely from text characters found on your keyboard or other special characters, but here is what the wiki has to say about that
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII). The term is also loosely used to refer to text based visual art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font (non-proportional fonts, as on a traditional typewriter) such as Courier for presentation.
Among the oldest known examples of ASCII art are the creations by computer-art pioneer Kenneth Knowlton from around 1966, who was working for Bell Labs at the time. “Studies in Perception I” by Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon from 1966 shows some examples of their early ASCII art.
One of the main reasons ASCII art was born was because early printers often lacked graphics ability and thus characters were used in place of graphic marks. Also, to mark divisions between different print jobs from different users, bulk printers often used ASCII art to print large banners, making the division easier to spot so that the results could be more easily separated by a computer operator or clerk. ASCII art was also used in early e-mail when images could not be embedded.
The widespread usage of ASCII art can be traced to the computer bulletin board systems of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The limitations of computers of that time period necessitated the use of text characters to represent images. Along with ASCII’s use in communication, however, it also began to appear in the underground online art groups of the period. An ASCII comic is a form of webcomic which uses ASCII text to create images. In place of images in a regular comic, ASCII art is used, with the text or dialog usually placed underneath.
I find that stuff so geeky and so fascinating how these things come about. Whether you LOVE or HATE ASCII you cannot deny how much of a role it has had in the formation of modern computing and the internet, geeks love this stuff by default because it brings up the history of our computing days and brings back those good ole memories! So whatever you are working on, make a throwback to the good ole ASCII days or use some geeky concept in your next project – it will be awesome. promise. Whatever you get out of this I hope you ENJOY!
Real Life ASCII Art! Jk its actually 3d/Flash, if you click play it falls apart, that is pretty cool. Even if it is a little old school lol.
Ah this brings me back to the early days of the internet, when I remember downloading software or going to a ‘hacker’ site and it was so awesome JUST BECAUSE it had epic ASCII Art like this (actually the cool factor of whatever it was typically depended on how cool the ASCII art was haha)! Ahh nostalgia memories!
What was your favorite ASCII Artwork? Got any good ones we should see? What is your best ASCII Memory? Let us know in the comments below – and THANKS FOR READING!