ASCII art
Among the oldest known examples of ASCII art are the creations by computer-art pioneer Kenneth Knowlton from around 1966, who was working for Bell Labs at the time.
[1] "Studies in Perception I" by Knowlton and Leon Harmon from 1966 shows some examples of their early ASCII art.
Also, to mark divisions between different print jobs from different users, bulk printers often used ASCII art to print large banner pages, making the division easier to spot so that the results could be more easily separated by a computer operator or clerk.
[better source needed][4][5] Typists could find guides in books or magazines with instructions on how to type portraits or other depictions.
[4][8] In the 1960s, Andries van Dam published a representation of an electronic circuit produced on an IBM 1403 line printer.
[9] At the same time, Kenneth Knowlton was producing realistic images, also on line printers, by overprinting several characters on top of one another.
The widespread usage of ASCII art can be traced to the computer bulletin board systems of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
[10] 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, an acronym for "Multi-User Dungeon", (which are textual multiplayer role-playing video games), Internet Relay Chat, Email, message boards, and other forms of online communication which commonly employ the needed fixed-width.
ASCII art is seen to this day on the CLI app Neofetch, which displays the logo of the OS on which it is invoked.
[15] BBS systems were based on ASCII and ANSI art, as were most DOS and similar console applications, and the precursor to AOL.
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.
[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][excessive citations] 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.
"Typewriter-style" lettering, made from individual letter characters:[31] Line art, for creating shapes: Solid art, for creating filled objects: Shading, using symbols with various intensities for creating gradients or contrasts: Combinations of the above, often used as signatures, for example, at the end of an email: As-pixel characters use combinations of ░ , █ , ▄, ▀ (Block Elements), and/or ⣿, ⣴, ⢁, etc (Braille ASCII) to make pictures: The simplest forms of ASCII art are combinations of two or three characters for expressing emotion in text.
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".)
[36][37][failed verification] 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.
"Block ASCIIs" were widely used on the PC during the 1990s until the Internet replaced BBSes as the main communication platform.
In that same year the second major underground art scene group "Insane Creators Enterprise", or ICE, was founded.
The Amiga style ASCII artwork was most often released in the form of a single text file, which included all the artwork (usually requested), with some design parts in between, as opposed to the PC art scene where the art work was released as a ZIP archive with separate text files for each piece.
Popular editors used to make this kind of ASCII art include Microsoft Notepad, CygnusEditor also known as CED (Amiga), and EditPlus2 (PC).
Other programs allow one to automatically convert an image to text characters, which is a special case of vector quantization.
Still images or movies can also be converted to ASCII on various UNIX and UNIX-like systems using the AAlib (black and white) or libcaca (colour) graphics device driver, or the VLC media player or mpv under Windows, Linux or macOS; all of which render the screen using ASCII symbols instead of pixels.
Early computers in use when ASCII art came into vogue had monospaced fonts for screen and printer displays.
For example, the music video for American singer Beck's song "Black Tambourine"[46] is made up entirely of ASCII characters that approximate the original footage.
VLC, a media player software, can render any video in colored ASCII through the libcaca module.
There are a variety of other types of art using text symbols from character sets other than ASCII and/or some form of color coding.
Unicode would seem to offer the ultimate flexibility in producing text based art with its huge variety of characters.
'Glitcher' is one example of Unicode art, initiated in 2012: "These symbols, intruding up and down, are made by combining lots of diacritical marks.
"[50] The corresponding creations are favored in web browsers (thanks to their always better support[51]), as geekily stylized usernames for social networks.
With a fair compatibility, and among different online tools, Facebook symbols[52] showcases various types of Unicode art, mainly for aesthetic purpose (Ɯıḳĭƥḙȡḯả Wîkipêȡıẚ Ẉǐḳîṗȅḍȉā Ẃįḵįṗẻḑìẵ Ẉĭḵɪṕḗdïą Ẇïƙỉpểɗĭà Ẅȉḱïṕȩđĩẵ etc.).
