The real roots of ASCII art
By Marc Perton
All true, of course. But to kick it really old skool, you’ve gotta do ASCII art the way I first learned it, back in I.S. 180: By hand on a manual typewriter. Doing ASCII art this way was incredibly tedious, since you basically had to type in rows of characters based on an instruction sheet. Make a mistake and you were toast (well, there was always Ko-Rec-Type). But the end results were great, and made it worth all the tedium. Sure, just a few years later, the technology to do this instantly and effortlessly would be available to just about anyone. But back in the day, the idea of typing a sheet of random characters and having it turn into a picture of Charlie Brown or a Thanksgiving turkey was amazingly cool. That, and it let the typing teacher kick back and not have to teach us anything new for a few lessons each term.
Photojojo—a great site filled with tips not about photography but about neat things to do with photos—has a link to a service that can turn any photo into ASCII art. I don’t think this is new, but it’s cool nevertheless. However, I was struck by something in the post about the “old-skool” days of ASCII graphics:
It was a simpler time. A time when computers didn’t have fancy graphics and candy-colored buttons, and if they wanted to show you a cranky green ogre, they didn’t use CG. They used our friends “|”, “”, “/”, and “.”
All true, of course. But to kick it really old skool, you’ve gotta do ASCII art the way I first learned it, back in I.S. 180: By hand on a manual typewriter. Doing ASCII art this way was incredibly tedious, since you basically had to type in rows of characters based on an instruction sheet. Make a mistake and you were toast (well, there was always Ko-Rec-Type). But the end results were great, and made it worth all the tedium. Sure, just a few years later, the technology to do this instantly and effortlessly would be available to just about anyone. But back in the day, the idea of typing a sheet of random characters and having it turn into a picture of Charlie Brown or a Thanksgiving turkey was amazingly cool. That, and it let the typing teacher kick back and not have to teach us anything new for a few lessons each term.
May 28th, 2007 19:04
[...] Online Following up on our newsletter about turning photos into ASCII art, reader Marc Perton links to the origins of ASCII art as instructions for typewriters. Chec [...]
April 6th, 2008 17:15
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