A Forgotten Moment in ASCII Art History | Hacker News Reader

A Forgotten Moment in ASCII Art History

theatlantic.com

144 pointsbenbreen21 comments

Even older, this one dates from the 1600s, it is a picture of some wings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Wings#/media/File:Easte...

And this one from the fourth century is an altar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altar_poem#/media/File:Optatia...

This one comes from 300BC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simmias_of_Rhodes#/media/File:...

Differs from ASCII art in that they're (all?) constructed of single letters repeated, and not always in a line, and not always complete letters. See the first example - all Bs, with erased areas, and even some curved rows of Bs.

ASCII art uses various characters in precise typographical lines and ideally uses the shapes of the various characters to represent the shape and shading of the desired image.

It does qualify for me as ASCII art, since I often see the term used loosely to encompass any art made from typographic characters.

I am a huge fan of these two experimental pieces from 'ASCII' artist Raquel Meyers and chiptune/electronica musician Goto80:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y82QTBMBX4o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=054vq9Sd8Ow

FWIW, I would have been more likely to click on this if instead of the clickbaity title 'Solving a Century-Old Typographical Mystery', which makes me expect to be disappointed or be something I've already ready (like the typeface thrown into the Thames), it had a more informative title like 'Discovering ASCII Art in 1800s Newspapers and Why'.

(Where's dang when you actually need him to edit a submission title for once...)

Fair enough, I agree that the main title is pretty clickbait-y. Luckily there was still time for me to edit the title myself to an excerpt from the subtitle ("a forgotten moment in ASCII art history").

Semi-related: an archive of the PC ASCII & ANSI art scene: https://artpacks.org

Wow, that website is great, it really makes me feel like I'm on a BBS in the 90s. While I'm surfing it, I can almost smell the antique hardware.

See also French poet Guillaume Apollinaire's "Calligrammes", published in 1918:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calligrammes

ASCII is a character encoding designed for computers. I wouldn't have been picky about the author calling it ASCII art but he also says ASCII characters in several places. So what should it be called? How about type art?

ASCII is a character encoding. But ASCII is also a graphics style. This is the latter.

The author calls it "typewriter art" but in the linked article it seems like in its own time it was referred to as "artyping":

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/the-lo...

awesome link, love the typewriter's instruction

This is typewriter art which was a fad in the nineteenth century. The author's persistence in calling it "ASCII" while mentioning typewriters only three times in the article is laughable.

The article is aimed at a modern reader so uses modern terms. It's really no different to how we have terms like "classic rock" and "oldskool" when back then they were simply just "rock" and "house" music.

If people are not familiar with your subject then you have to use language what is familiar.

TL;DR pro-tip: to see the ASCII art in question, just scroll down, they are surfaced in the article, not sequestered as links

in a way, https://github.com/blitzcode/term-gfx & similar projects are a continuity of these kind of art

I love it :D

The misuse of the term ASCII bothers me.

Many decades before the word ASCII was defined, even.

Which came about in 1963, i reckon.

Makes one wonder why they don't call it EBCDIC art (just kidding) or BAUDOT art.

This stunt was done for a long time before the invention of ASCII on RTTY equipment as well.

The "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" is a digital character set (mapping between numbers and glyps plus equipment control codes) that was not invented and standardized until the 1960's.

It is quaint to call some 19th century artifact "ASCII text" (Perhaps, "Monospaced type"?)

All right, folks; they had ASCII in the 19th century. Have it your way!

"There were no videos? Then what did you watch on MTV?" -- Kelly Bundy, Married with Children TV Sitcom.

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