ASCII art

ASCII art is a graphic design method that uses computers to create images from the 95 printable characters (out of 128 total) defined by the 1963 ASCII Standard, as well as characters from ASCII-compliant sets that include proprietary extended characters beyond standard 7-bit ASCII. The term is also broadly applied to text-based visual art in general. Any text editor can be used to make ASCII art, and it is commonly associated with free-form languages. For proper display, most ASCII art relies on a fixed-width font—like Courier or Consolas—similar to a traditional typewriter.

One of the earliest known examples of ASCII art comes from computer-art pioneer Kenneth Knowlton, who worked at Bell Labs around 1966. His collaboration with Leon Harmon, "Studies in Perception I" (1966), features early instances of this art form. ASCII art emerged largely because early printers lacked graphics capabilities, so characters were used instead of graphic marks.

Typewriter art

It also helped divide bulk print jobs: large banner pages made with ASCII art allowed operators or clerks to easily separate output from different users. In early email, where images could not be embedded, ASCII art served a similar purpose. Typewriters have been used for visual art since 1867. Typists could find guides in books and magazines that showed how to type portraits or other depictions.

TTY and RTTY

TTY stands for "TeleTYpe" or "TeleTYpewriter," also known as a teleprinter or teletype. RTTY stands for Radioteletype, using character sets like Baudot code that predated ASCII. According to the "RTTY Handbook," text images were sent via teletypewriter as early as 1923, though no examples of that early RTTY art have been found. Text images did appear frequently on radioteletype during the 1960s and 1970s.

Line-printer art

In the 1960s, Andries van Dam published a representation of an electronic circuit produced on an IBM 1403 line printer. Around the same time, Kenneth Knowlton created realistic images on line printers by overprinting multiple characters on top of each other. This was not strictly ASCII art, because the 1403 ran on an EBCDIC-coded platform and used character sets derived from EBCDIC, though some glyphs were shared.

ASCII art

The widespread use of ASCII art dates to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when computer bulletin board systems were popular. The limited capabilities of computers at the time made text characters necessary for representing images. Alongside its use in communication, ASCII art also appeared in underground online art groups of that era. An ASCII comic is a form of webcomic that uses ASCII text for images, with dialogue placed underneath.

During the 1990s, graphical browsing and variable-width fonts became common, causing a decline in ASCII art. However, it survived in online MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons), Internet Relay Chat, email, message boards, and other text-based communication that required fixed-width fonts. Today, ASCII art appears in the CLI app Neofetch, which displays the logo of the operating system it runs on. Joan Stark, a prolific ASCII artist active on Usenet's alt.ascii.art in the mid-1990s, is often cited as an example of increased online participation by women.

ASCII and, more importantly, ANSI were staples of the early technological era. Terminal systems relied on coherent presentation using color and control signals standardized in terminal protocols. Over time, warez groups entered the ASCII art scene, releasing .nfo files with software, cracks, or other reverse-engineering releases. These files typically feature ASCII art showing the group's name and borders around release notes.

ASCII art is used wherever text is easier to print or transmit than graphics, or where images cannot be transmitted at all. This includes typewriters, teleprinters, non-graphic computer terminals, printer separators, early computer networking (such as BBSes), email, and Usenet news messages. It also appears in source code to represent company or product logos, flow control diagrams, or other schematics.

In some cases, entire source code is a piece of ASCII art—for example, an entry in an early International Obfuscated C Code Contest visually resembles a binary adder drawn in logic ports while actually being a program that adds numbers. Some electronic schematic archives also represent circuits using ASCII art. 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. Early mainframe games played on terminals frequently used ASCII art as well.