ASCII (as-kee) is the acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII is one of the first digital representations of the English alphabet and incorporates letters, symbols and punctuation. Used on some of the first computers and communications equipment, it was invented by Bell and designed in the early ‘60s for teleprinters (electromechanical typewriters). While most modern “computerized alphabets” are still based on ASCII, they now support many more characters.
ASCII art has been around for decades. Some of the oldest examples from the ‘60s are the creations of Kenneth Knowlton who was working for Bell Labs. One of the main reasons why ASCII art came to be was that early printers lacked the ability to print pictures so characters were used in the place of graphics. ASCII art was born.
The first known example of characters used as an image in this same fashion was in 1867 when Flora Stacey used her typewriter to make a picture of a butterfly.
I couldn’t get examples directly on this blog due to the way this website text is formatted but I can post a link.
http://images.google.ca/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=ascii+art&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=2sJhS9nNGIqsNtC3pMcB&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CCoQsAQwAw
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Here is a better link
ReplyDeletehttp://www.heartnsoul.com/ascii_art/dinos.txt
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