[Today’s random Sourcerer profile: https://sourcerer.io/curran]

While researching this article about the timeline and evolution of ASCII art, I was expecting to proffer a passing acknowledgment to the people who came first — the folks who invented interesting artistic effects using old manual typewriters, and whose techniques informed the evolution of ASCII art as a later independent phenomenon. That is, until I saw some of their work, whereupon I was astounded.

The above ‘mechanical drawing’ of a butterfly, for example, was produced by a lady called Flora F.F. Stacey in 1898 with nothing but a typewriter. Yes, as well as the decorative border, the butterfly itself was created on a typewriter. As described in Typewriter Art, A Modern Anthology, the process involved “… feeding the paper into the rollers at numerous times, each at a different angle to allow the overprinting and fine-tuning of the image. Decisions are made as to how to turn a letterform, or combination of letterforms, into a variety of tones”. In fact, typewriter artists had access to several facilities not available to the later ASCII pioneers. For example, a sheet of paper could be manipulated through several directions and orientations, and the character spacing could be manually varied for effect.

The earliest known examples of recognizable ASCII art were created by a Bell Labs employee called Kenneth Knowlton in the mid-1960s, although it wouldn’t be until the late 1970s and early 1980s for it to become widespread, with the emergence of bulletin board systems (BBSs). To be pedantic, Knowlton’s early work was EBCDIC art (EBCDIC is an alternative form of character encoding used on large IBM computers) and took its inspiration from some of the very same themes that have occupied many artists through the ages.

Describing the above nude and other similar images, Knowlton and his partner Leon D. Harmon referred to them as ‘computer processed creatures’.

Beyond the context of experimental art, what we now refer to as ASCII art was at least partially conceived for more functional reasons than artistic reasons. Early printers simply lacked the capability to reproduce graphics, and shared bulk printers would also separate the output of print jobs using ASCII banners so that people could more easily identify their own output. Just like typewriters, most ASCII art features non-proportional fonts and nowadays, the term can be loosely (and equally often controversially, because it defeats the universality of pure ASCII art) used to refer to text based art in general.

Wikipedia image of an ASCII chart from an ‘earlier-than 1972’ printer manual (b1 is the least significant bit).

Originally, ASCII art consisted of pictures created by combining the 95 printable characters (from a total of 128) defined by the 1963 ASCII standard, By today’s standards, ASCII art has a simplistic but charming character and creative examples are not hard to find — even Reddit has an ASCII subreddit (some of which is probably NSFW). This said, with the demise of sites like GeoCities, many of the older references now point to 404 pages. The venerable Usenet’s alt.ascii-art, in its day, hosted a vibrant and active community. Below is an SR-71 Blackbird as still found — among lots of other interesting creations — on http://www.chris.com/ascii/.

Soon, the same general techniques were employed with larger character sets — what became known as ANSI art (or extended ASCII art) used a set of 256 letters, numbers and symbols found on code page 437 of an IBM PC. ANSI art, containing symbols actually intended for drawing, found particular favor among early BBS communities.

The Sixteen Colors ANSI Art and ASCII Art Archive has a good representative example on their Facebook home page:

Apparently, Microsoft declared ASCII art ‘dead’ in June 1998 when Internet Explorer’s Tip of the Day pronounced:

CUTE, BUT USELESS Many people still like to use ASCII characters to draw pictures in their e-mail. You know, you see those pictures made up of numerous X’s, I’s, etc. These things were cool in their day. The problem is, their day is over. ASCII pictures don’t display correctly when the viewer is using proportional fonts — and a huge number of people (perhaps most) are using proportional fonts. We suggest that you resist the temptation to send ASCII pictures with your e-mail.

Many were up in arms at Microsoft’s apparent attempt to destroy three decades of art culture. Some people attributed the intervention to Bill Gates himself, who was suspected of being overzealous in promoting Microsoft’s proportional fonts.

There’s nothing wrong with being decorative and evocative of earlier times, but ASCII art has found some ingenious practical uses as well. Useful for transforming simple ASCII art diagrams into attractive illustrations, ditaa is a Java command-line utility that accepts diagrams like:

… and emits diagrams like:

You can find it at http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/. There are several other similar tools like asciitosvg, Asciio and asciiflow, which is an online editor that enables you to draw your ASCII diagrams in a browser.

Going further, there are (countless) programs that will convert regular images into their ASCII art equivalents — with some interesting variations across the range. If you’re technically minded, Stackoverflow even contains some starter code — and the results are pretty impressive:

Hacker culture embraced cowsay — a program that simply generates ASCII art pictures of a cow (and other animals) with a word balloon. It can take its command line input via a pipe and short sequences such as:

fortune | cowsay

… produce example output such as:

I was keen to find out if there’s an ASCII art image widely recognized to be the best ever example of the form, but the notion seems contrary to what must have been a culture of experimentation and iteration. Certainly, there’s an extensive curated selection on this Pinterest page, which, it has to be said, is fairly liberal in its definition of ASCII art.

The original emoticons drew on the heritage of ASCII art and were essentially textual representations of a writer’s mood. The first ASCII emoticons

:-)

and

:-(

were written by Scott Fahlman in 1982, but they go even further back and first appeared on proprietary computer systems in the early 1970s.

"Face" Interpretation

----------------------------------------------------------------



:-) Ha, ha; smile

(-: Submitter is left-handed

|-) Hee, hee

|-D Ho, ho

:-D Submitter talks too much

:-> Hey, hey; smirk

:-( Boo hoo; disappointed

:-< Really sad

:-C Really disappointed

:-| Hmmm; contemplation

:-O Uh oh!

:-o Submitter is shocked. com

The entire collection can be found here. As computer capabilities improved, so the emoticon gave way to the emoji and it’s an interesting exercise to trace the lineage of some of the graphically rich modern emojis back to their plain text days.

In conclusion, from what I’ve seen and contrary to that Microsoft Tip of the Day, ASCII art isn’t dead, but it is perhaps enjoying a period of relaxed retirement punctuated by short and often violent bursts of activity.

You never know when you’re going to bump into it.