18 Facts About ASCII art

Widespread usage of ASCII art can be traced to the computer bulletin board systems of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

An ASCII art comic is a form of webcomic which uses ASCII art text to create images.

In place of images in a regular comic, ASCII art is used, with the text or dialog usually placed underneath.

In some cases, the entire source code of a program is a piece of ASCII art – for instance, an entry to one of the earlier International Obfuscated C Code Contest is a program that adds numbers, but visually looks like a binary adder drawn in logic ports.

Examples of ASCII-style art predating the modern computer era can be found in the June 1939, July 1948 and October 1948 editions of Popular Mechanics.

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Simplest forms of ASCII art are combinations of two or three characters for expressing emotion in text.

Adventures of Nerd Boy, or just Nerd Boy, was an ASCII art comic, published by Joaquim Gandara between 5 August 2001 and 17 July 2007, and consisting of 600 strips.

The emergence of ATASCII art coincided with the growing popularity of BBS Systems caused by availability of the acoustic couplers that were compatible with the 8-bit home computers.

The "oldskool" ASCII art looks more like the outlined drawings of shapes than real pictures.

Amiga ASCII art scene surfaced in 1992, seven years after the introduction of the Commodore Amiga 1000.

The classic 7-bit standard ASCII art characters remain predominant, but the extended characters are often used for "fine tuning" and "tweaking".

These applications typically allow the ASCII art to be saved as either a text file or as an image made up of ASCII text.

Early computers in use when ASCII art came into vogue had monospaced fonts for screen and printer displays.

Animated ASCII art started in 1970 from so-called VT100 animations produced on VT100 terminals.

Static ASCII art pictures are loaded and displayed one after another, creating the animation, very similar to how movie projectors unreel film reel and project the individual pictures on the big screen at movie theaters.

The IBM PC code pages include characters intended for simple drawing which often made this ASCII art appear much cleaner than that made with more traditional character sets.

Glitcher is one example of Unicode ASCII art, initiated in 2012: These symbols, intruding up and down, are made by combining lots of diacritical marks.

However, something similar has emerged to replace it: shaded or colored ASCII art, using ANSI video terminal markup or color codes to add a bit more tone variation.