ASCII Art | Code Like It's 198x

Stand close to a sheet of ASCII art and you see a jumble of letters, digits and punctuation. Step back and a face appears. Antic explained the trick to Atari owners in 1987: “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.”

Because it uses only the characters every printer and terminal already has, ASCII art could travel anywhere text could: down a radio link, out of a mainframe’s line printer, across a bulletin board to any make of computer. That portability is why it lasted, from teletype pictures to the logos at the top of 1990s scene releases, and why its smallest example, the sideways smiley, outlived almost everything else on this page.

Fast facts

What it is: a picture made from printable text characters, using their different densities as shades.
Before computers: radio amateurs sent “RTTY art” by teletype; one 1981 writer dated it to the 1920s.
Line-printer pictures: offered for download by CompuServe in 1980; the Snoopy calendar was the best-known example.
On bulletin boards: message signatures, full-screen pictures and, on PC boards, colour ANSI art.
The smiley: :-), proposed by Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon University on 19 September 1982.

From teletypes to line printers

The radio hams got there first. In February 1981 James J. Conroy told 80 Microcomputing readers that “the radio amateurs pioneered this field with their teletypes”: “Known as Radio Teletype (RTTY, pronounced ritty) Art, hams have been using teletypes and other printers to transmit visual information since the 1920’s. These Rembrandts of RTTY discovered that different densities of type characters approximate the shades of light and dark found in photographic images.” His own method for the TRS-80 was the same idea done by hand: lay a transparent grid over a high-contrast photograph, judge how dark each cell is, pick the character that matches, and type the result into LPRINT statements.

Large printers made the pictures larger. In January 1981 Creative Computing ran Raymond and Alice Kalush’s “Drawing Pictures Using Printer Plotting”, which began by describing the usual kind: “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).” Making one started the same way as Conroy’s: “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.” The Kaluses’ improvement used their Diablo 1620 printer’s ability to move in steps of 1/120 inch, so the picture was no longer tied to the character grid.

You did not have to draw your own. CompuServe’s MicroNET service advertised a “line printer art gallery” alongside its software exchange and games in BYTE in August 1980, and Antic’s June 1982 comparison of CompuServe and The Source listed the “Printer Art Gallery (downloading)” as one of CompuServe’s extras. By 1987 Antic could tell its readers that “Thousands of ‘character art’ pictures can be found online, free for the downloading”, that many bulletin boards had sections of “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 magazine’s type-in, Paul Tupaczewski’s ASCII Art Converter, turned those files into pictures on an Atari screen.

The Snoopy calendar

The line-printer picture almost everyone had seen was the Snoopy calendar, and magazines used it as shorthand for what computers were made to do in idle moments. 80 Microcomputing reported in November 1981 that some programmers feared a federal computer-crime bill “would make federal offenses the use of computers to keep track of bowling league scores, print Snoopy calendars and the like”. A Video Games writer in April 1984 remembered school friends teaching him to “make the machine print out Snoopy calendars and wall-length pictures of the U.S.S. Enterprise”. In April 1988 8000 Plus recalled the days when a mainframe’s “first chore each year would be to print out Snoopy calendars, and hackers knew that a startling percentage of ‘secure’ passwords would turn out to be PASSWORD, PEANUTS or SNOOPY.”

On the bulletin boards

Bulletin boards gave ASCII art a second life, on screen. Amiga Computing’s comms column explained the rules in March 1993: “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”. Users decorated their messages with those characters in “signatures”, which “aren’t always little. Some users create masterpieces of Ascii art which can take up an entire screen. However, this is generally frowned upon as it adds tremendously to other user’s costs, and three or four lines worth seems to be the accepted average.” Every extra line was paid for in phone time by everyone who read it.

On IBM-compatible boards the art gained colour and movement through ANSI escape codes, sequences that told the caller’s terminal where to put the cursor and which colour to use. A South Bay Users Group newsletter of May 1986 carried Jim Lynn’s “ANSI Art”, the second of a series for FidoNet sysops, which built on “simple ANSI cursor control and color changes” to fake a pop-up window inside a bulletin: save the cursor position, move it, draw the window and its border, and put the cursor back. The editor warned that “My printer has its own interpretation of ASCII.”

Commodore users met ANSI from the other side. In November 1993 dieHard noted that the C64 terminal program Novaterm “will allow you to view ANSI art and animations” when calling a DOS board. A Commodore sysop writing in Commodore World in May 1996 used ANSI codes on his own board, with “ASCII art backgrounds with menu files”, rotating colours and “even some animation”, and warned that it “takes time and patience to master”. Drawing tools followed. Amiga Shopper recommended HyperANSI to sysops in April 1995, a program that let them “create ANSI artwork with the ease associated with a pixel-based paint program”.

The smiley

The smallest ASCII picture has the longest history. On 19 September 1982 Scott Fahlman posted a suggestion to the computer science bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University, where readers kept mistaking jokes for serious notices: “I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-(”. Fahlman kept no copy, and the post was found again only in 2001–02, when a search through the university’s old backup tapes recovered it.

By the early 1990s the faces were everywhere. BBS Magazine ran a regular column on “Emoticons & Acronyms” in 1992. Amiga Shopper introduced them to British readers in March 1993: “In its simplest form, the smiley looks like this :-) (you will need to turn the page sideways to see it in all its glory)… 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.” Americans, the column added, called them “Emote Icons”, “sometimes shortened to ‘emoticons’”.

Converters and the scene

By the mid-1990s programs could turn pictures into text automatically. 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.” On the Amiga, ASCII Art Pro arrived on Amiga Format’s June 1997 cover CD with a note that shows how the demo scene had made the form its own: “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.”

Sources

80 Microcomputing no. 14, February 1981, p. 122: James J. Conroy, “Can Computing Be Art?” (RTTY art and his TRS-80 method).
Creative Computing vol. 7 no. 1, January 1981, p. 136: Raymond J. Kalush Jr. and Alice G. Kalush, “Drawing Pictures Using Printer Plotting”.
BYTE vol. 5 no. 8, August 1980: CompuServe MicroNET advertisement (“line printer art gallery”); the same advertisement ran in Creative Computing, January 1981.
Antic vol. 1 no. 2, June 1982: comparison of CompuServe and The Source.
Antic vol. 6 no. 3, July 1987: Paul Tupaczewski, “ASCII Art Converter”.
80 Microcomputing no. 23, November 1981, p. 70: the federal computer-crime bill and “Snoopy calendars”.
Video Games vol. 2 no. 7, April 1984: “Getting Down To BASICs”.
8000 Plus issue 19, April 1988: on mainframes, Snoopy calendars and passwords.
Amiga Computing issue 58, March 1993: comms column, “E-tiquette!”.
Dynamic Memories (South Bay Users Group), May 1986, p. 9: Jim Lynn, “ANSI Art”.
dieHard vol. 2 no. 10, November 1993: Novaterm and ANSI art.
Commodore World issue 15, May 1996: BBS column on ANSI graphics.
Amiga Shopper issue 48, April 1995: public-domain column, HyperANSI.
Amiga Shopper issue 23, March 1993: comms column, “(-: When you’re smiling :-)”.
BBS Magazine vol. 3 no. 5, May 1992: “Emoticons & Acronyms” column.
Scott E. Fahlman, the recovered post of 19 September 1982 and “Smiley Lore :-)”, Carnegie Mellon University (web): the original message and the recovery of the backup tapes. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/Orig-Smiley.htm and https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm
ST Format issue 67, February 1995: public-domain column, Ancient.
Amiga Format issue 98, June 1997: cover CD notes, ASCII Art Pro.