ascii art

ASCII art

ASCII art is an artistic medium that relies primarily on 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 1967 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 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, like on a traditional typewriter) such as Courier for presentation.

ASCII art had been originally developed around 1966,[citation needed] by computer-art pioneer Kenneth Knowlton, who was working for Bell Labs at the time.[1] "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.

History of ASCII art

Creating pictures from letters and writing symbols dates back to Ancient Egypt. Other examples were found from the Ancient Romans where the Roman characters were used to form an image.

Since 1867 typewriters have been used for creating visual art. The oldest known preserved example of typewriter art is a picture of a butterfly made in 1898 by a woman named Flora Stacey.

TTY stands for TeleTYpe/TeleTYpewriter and is also known as Teleprinter or Teletype. RTTY stands for Radioteletype. According to a chapter in the "RTTY Handbook", text images have been sent via teletypewriter as early as 1923. However, none of the "old" RTTY art has been discovered yet. What is known is the fact that text images appeared frequently on radio teletype in the 1960s and the 1970s.

There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126.

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.

During the 1990s, graphical browsing and variable-width fonts became increasingly popular, leading to a decline in ASCII art. Despite this, ASCII art continued to survive through online MUDs (textual multiplayer roleplaying games), Internet Relay Chat, E-mail, message boards and other forms of online communication which commonly employ the needed fixed-width.

Today, ASCII art is still widely used in websites such as GameFAQs and LUElinks. A popular ASCII art is LUEshi, which shows Mario riding a Yoshi.

Over the Years, Warez Groups have began to get into the ASCII art scene. Warez groups usually release .nfo files with their software, cracks or general illegal software reverse-engineering releases. The ASCII art will usually include the Warez groups name and maybe some ASCII borders on the outsides of the release notes etc.

ASCII art is used wherever text can be more readily printed or transmitted than graphics, or in some cases, where the transmission of pictures is not possible. This includes typewriters, teletypes, non-graphic computer terminals, in early computer networking (e.g., BBSes), e-mail, and Usenet news messages. ASCII art is also used within the source code of computer programs for representation of company or product logos, and flow control or other diagrams. 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 art predating the modern computer era can be found in the June 1939, July 1948 and October 1948 editions of Popular Mechanics.

Taking the medium to extremes, there is a 2D platform multiplayer shooter game designed entirely in colour ASCII art titled "0verkill". There is also a video driver for the popular video game Quake that displays the game in ASCII art. MPlayer and VLC media player can display videos as ASCII art. ASCII art is used in the making of DOS-based ZZT games. Another example of ASCII art in games is "Original War", a little-known game for Windows, in which the cutscenes for the Russians are made up totally of ASCII art.

Main article: Emoticon

The simplest forms of ASCII art are combinations of two or three characters for expressing emotion in text. They are commonly referred to as 'emoticon', 'smilie', or 'smiley'.

There is another type of one-line ASCII art that does not require the mental rotation of pictures, which is widely known in Japan as kaomoji (literally "face characters".) Traditionally, they are referred to as "ASCII face ". Today, some call them "verticons".

More complex examples use several lines of text to draw large symbols or more complex figures.

The two original text or ASCII smileys, :-) to indicate a joke and :-( to mark things that are not a joke, were invented on September 19, 1982 by Scott E. Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Computer Science. His original post at the CMU CS general board, where he suggested the use of the smileys, was retrieved on September 10, 2002 by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax (cmu-750x) as proof to support the claim.