ASCII Art

ASCII art is a picture made of printable text characters, so that it survives any printer or terminal that can show the characters at all. The sources held here trace it from line-printer “printer pictures” downloaded from CompuServe around 1980, through the ANSI colour art and signature blocks of bulletin boards, to the ASCII logos of the 1990s Amiga scene.

Fast facts

Earliest form held here: “printer pictures” for line printers, with a 2:1 height-to-width distortion (Creative Computing, January 1981).
Where they came from: CompuServe’s “line printer art gallery” (1980) and, later, its ARTSIG area (1987).
The cliché: the Snoopy calendar, which magazines from 1981 to 1988 use as shorthand for what mainframes were made to print.
ANSI art: colour and cursor-positioned art for IBM-compatible BBSs, being taught to Fido sysops by 1986.
Smileys: :-) and its variants, “almost impossible” to avoid on bulletin boards by 1993.

Printer pictures

In January 1981 Creative Computing ran Raymond and Alice Kalush’s “Drawing Pictures Using Printer Plotting”, which describes the older form of the art before improving on it: “Printer graphics bring to mind wall murals and posters. Most printer pictures require standing back several yards to be fully appreciated. This type of picture usually has a 2:1 distortion of height versus width (i.e. one letter down is about two letters across in distance).” The making of one was manual: “find or make a good line drawing. Next, put a piece of graph paper over it and fill in the squares over the picture lines”, then type the result into a text editor.

CompuServe was offering them for download by 1980. Its MicroNET advertisement in BYTE for August 1980 lists a “line printer art gallery” beside its software exchange and games, and Antic’s June 1982 comparison of CompuServe and The Source notes the “Printer Art Gallery (downloading)” as a CompuServe speciality. By July 1987 Antic was printing Paul Tupaczewski’s ASCII Art Converter, a type-in that turned the files into Atari hi-res screens, and its introduction is the clearest period description of the form:

ASCII art works by taking various characters — X, M, 9, etc — and combining them in patterns to make pictures. When you stand up close, the pictures don’t look like anything except a jumble of letters and numbers. But when you stand back, you’ll see a detailed image — perhaps Abraham Lincoln or Marilyn Monroe.

The same piece says the files were offered on bulletin boards, “especially a non-Atari BBS”, as “printer art” or “ASCII character art”, and that “Type GO ARTSIG when you log onto CompuServe and you’ll find a vast storehouse of ASCII art files.”

The Snoopy calendar

The line-printer picture everybody had seen was the Snoopy calendar, and magazines used it as a byword. 80 Microcomputing reported in November 1981 that critics of a federal computer-crime bill feared it “would make federal offenses the use of computers to keep track of bowling league scores, print Snoopy calendars and the like”. A Video Games reviewer in April 1984 remembered school friends who taught him “to play the games and make the machine print out Snoopy calendars and wall-length pictures of the U.S.S. Enterprise”, and 8000 Plus in April 1988 recalled mainframes whose “first chore each year would be to print out Snoopy calendars”.

On the bulletin boards

The BBS gave ASCII art a second life on screen. Amiga Computing’s comms column explained in March 1993 that “because all types of computer can connect to BBSs, some conventions have grown up as to the types of characters which messages may contain. This is generally the basic Ascii set”, and that those characters “are often used by imaginative users to create little graphics which decorate their messages. These are known as ‘signatures’ and aren’t always little. Some users create masterpieces of Ascii art which can take up an entire screen.” Full-screen signatures were “generally frowned upon as it adds tremendously to other user’s costs, and three or four lines worth seems to be the accepted average.”

On IBM-compatible boards the art gained colour and position through ANSI escape codes. A South Bay Users Group newsletter of May 1986 carries Jim Lynn’s “ANSI Art”, the second of a series for Fido sysops, which builds on “simple ANSI cursor control and color changes” to fake a pop-up window inside a bulletin by saving the cursor position, drawing the window and its border, and restoring it. The editor warned readers to “Beware of the graphics in the following article. My printer has its own interpretation of ASCII.”

Commodore users met ANSI from the other side. dieHard noted in November 1993 that the C64 terminal program Novaterm “will allow you to view ANSI art and animations” on visits to a DOS BBS, and a Commodore sysop writing in Commodore World in May 1996 used ANSI graphics for menus, “ASCII art backgrounds with menu files”, and warned that files made in local mode “may be in PET-ASCII”, so that callers on other machines saw the upper and lower case transposed. Dedicated editors followed: Amiga Shopper described HyperANSI in April 1995 as letting sysops “create ANSI artwork with the ease associated with a pixel-based paint program”.

Smileys

The smallest ASCII art is the smiley. BBS Magazine was already running a column on “Emoticons & acronyms” in May 1992, and Amiga Shopper’s comms column in March 1993 introduced them to British readers: “In its simplest form, the smiley looks like this :-) (you will need to turn the page sideways to see it in all its glory). It is a very simple graphic, which you add to your writing to express emotion. These smileys have become so popular in the last few years that it is now almost impossible to find a bulletin board message that doesn’t have a smiley of one sort or another attached to it.” The column adds that Americans called them “Emote Icons”, “sometimes shortened to ‘emoticons’”, and points readers to a smiley conference on the CIX system. Amiga Computing covered the same ground the same month.

Converters and the scene

By the mid-1990s the picture-to-text direction had been automated. ST Format recommended Ancient in February 1995 — it “neatly converts high-res Degas pictures into ASCII art. If you’ve ever tried to construct pictures out of ASCII symbols […] then you’ll know just how much of a pain it can be” — and noted the ASCII Christmas cards the magazine had received. Amiga Format’s June 1997 cover CD carried ASCII Art Pro with the note “Ever wondered how those ‘scene’ guys do all those ASCII logos? Well, they probably use something like ASCII Art Pro to do the job for them. This package allows you to ‘draw’ in ASCII and will also convert an IFF picture.” That is the only mention in the magazines held here of the demo-scene ASCII logo as a form of its own.

Pictures from punctuation