If you remember the term ASCII Art, congratulations, you've been around long enough to see the Internet grow from a baby into an adult.
Believe it or not, this was one the most searched topics in the Internet, in the early 90's.
Technology was so good and so Lightning fast (pun intended) that people would prefer to visit sites with no images. It was simply too boring and too expensive to wait for images to load. Pages with images would be naturally ostracised. Nobody wanted to look at images.
- "Give us text, give us text!" - Shouted the mobs!
Nowadays people close pages... if they don't have enough images. Ahahah!
What a long way we've come, eh?
Meanwhile, ASCII Art has become a lost and buried form of art.
What is ASCII?
- 7-Bit ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), as defined in ISO-646 is a basic set of 128 numbered symbols which almost all kinds of computer can display.
What is ASCII Art?
- ASCII Art is any sort of pictures or diagrams drawn with the printable characters in the ASCII character set.
The most common ASCII Art picture is the smiley. :-)
But as you'll see, it is possible to do a lot more.
ASCII Art Examples
There's a big archive set up at www.asciiart.eu. Here are a few examples taken from this site:
Art by Joris Bellenger
Venus de Milo by Morfina
Queen of the Nile by John Stachowicz
PC by Joan G. Stark
The Beatles by Veronica Karlsson
Mona Lisa by Normand Veilleux
Swimmer on Starting Block by Joan G. Stark
Snorkel by Joan G. Stark
St. Francis of Assisi by Nina Butorac
Me after a karate grading ;) by Shanaka Dias
In Honour of Colin Douthwaites by Shanaka Dias
Calvin and Hobbes by Shanaka Dias
Animated ASCII Art
- After some time and, assisted by the evolution of the Internet, artists got more creative and started combining ASCII Art pictures to create ASCII Art Animations.
Animated ASCII Art Examples
(Unfortunately, these animations have been copied over the Internet so many times that their authors are long forgotten...)
Once upon a time there was a Walking Man...
... who fell in love with a Dancing Girl...
He Blowed Her a Kiss...
They got together and Dancing Kid was born!
A few more examples
Here's a Sexy Ass:
Was this the beginning of Internet Porn? Most likely. But...
The Giraffe Says No...
... and the Laughing Kid explodes into laughter:
Other interesting ASCII Art Archives:
- The Ascii Art Dictionary created by Andreas Freise
- Christopher Johnson's ASCII Art Collection
If you want to try and create your own ASCII Art, here's a very cool Online ASCII Art Editor:
- ASCII Flow Infinity developed by Lewis Hemens; designed by Sam Irvine and Ryan Gilbanks
If you want to create an ASCII Art from an existing image, here are a couple of Online Tools:
- ASCII Art Generator for Geeks by Michael van Schaik
- ASCII Art Generator by Shawn Wilson
Take it a step further and create an Animated ASCII Art from an existing Animated Gif:
And to conclude, I'll point you to a cool article about ASCII Art:
- The Surprisingly Rich History of ASCII Art by David Cassel
Were you fan of ASCII Art, back then? Let me know your opinion in the comments.
I hope you've enjoyed this article!
