> I can’t imagine they’d be afforded much time to spend designing ASCII art for a debug screen.
It's something to doodle while waiting for the compiler I reckon. I can't imagine OS development to be a fast iterative process.
It's something to doodle while waiting for the compiler I reckon. I can't imagine OS development to be a fast iterative process.
But that aside, someone else has now linked to the source and it wasn’t MS.
I will grant you that there are tools that will generate ASCII art using letter shading (based on the number of pixels that letter lights up) but that also is very different to using the characters themselves to draw the shape of the image (like with emoticons). That still relies on raw human creativity…well maybe AI could now do it but that wasn’t around 15 years ago when Win 8 was in development, let alone back when those images were created.
No matter how useful the tool, it's still the artist that makes the art of course. But the tools can make a real difference in how creative someone can be - I doubt much of the really creative ascii art is/was made with notepad.
My point was simply that there are tools out there that really can approach that experience of 'doodling' with ascii, and I thought some people might not have been exposed to that before.