I definitely believe it. It's inspiring to read about the techniques and hacks used at the dawn of game development, so many of which are still useful today.

Re: ASCII painting, recently I was looking into using an ASCII drawing tool like Monodraw [1] for creating ASCII maps. A format as portable as plaintext is appealing.

[1] http://monodraw.helftone.com

Yes! There are lots of nice ASCII painting tools around. In particular, there's no difference between an ASCII art editor and a roguelike map editor, except for the name :) Thought there was a nice JS one somewhere, but can't find it.