What they created is, in some cases, strikingly similar to the ASCII art of the BBS days, but how they thought about what they were doing depended on the times in which they worked.

Perhaps the one constant? This kind of text art has been snickered at and marginalized since the 1890s.

But as fewer and fewer typewriters clack away, striking ink to paper, and text continues to cede ground to the hypervisual web, a patina seems to be growing on the art form.

This spring, a new anthology will debut, Typewriter Art: A Modern Anthology, edited by Barry Tullett. And Lori Emerson, an English professor at UC-Boulder and director of the Media Archaeology Lab, has been excavating examples of mid-century "artyping." It was her tweets and posts that set me off on a journey to put together a rough sketch of the pre-history of ASCII art.

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In September of 1893, a magazine called Illustrated Phonographic World, which was "Devoted to the Interests of Shorthand and Typewriting," struck back at two other publications for hating on typewriter art.

The Reporter's Journal agreed with the Phonetic Journal about "the foolishness of attempting to make sketches by means of typewriters." Furthermore, the London publication continued, "Some of our American contemporaries indulge largely in facsimiles of this class of work, and this has tended to foster the absurd custom."

Stung by the white glove, Illustrated Phonographic World set out to prove that typewriter sketches were indeed worthy of respect. "We believe that any endeavor which will cultivate painstaking and accuracy on the part of operators should be encouraged," they wrote. "The endeavor to excel in artistic typewriting unquestionable does this. The pen maketh the exact man; so will the typewriter, which is only the modern pen."

Along with this hearty defense, they published an image created by one Flora F. Stacey, of the Santa Maria, one of Christoper Columbus' ships and offered $5 in cash for a further "artistic specimen" sent in by readers. Of those they published three that I could find, including another by Flora Stacey, the butterfly on the right. In the middle, we find Christopher Columbus himself, courtesy of Mr. Frederick Carles of Boston, Massachusetts.

From the commentary at the time, people couldn't help themselves. Some people just liked making pictures with typewriters.

At least one scholar connected up typewriter art and pointilism as pointing the way to the idea of pixels on a screen being used to represent everything.

"Seen from a distance, the hundreds of dots, in virtue of the visual phenomenon known as persistence of vision, coalesced into larger figures," applied mathematician Philip Davis wrote of Georges Seurat's pointilism. "When in the 1880s typewriters became commonplace, this kind of image was done on the typewriter with letters or blank spaces, was known as typewriter art. In the first generation of computers, typewriter art was automated, and pictures of Washington, Lincoln, Harry Truman etc., were produced in this way. When computer output moved from the typed page to the television or video screen, the whole screen was subdivided into a certain large number, say 1,024 x 1,024 = 1,048,576 areas or so-called 'pixels', each of which could be addressed, shaded, coloured or otherwise transformed or manipulated."