ASCII Art
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is the most common format for text files in computers and on the Internet. In an ASCII file, each alphabetic, numeric, or special character is represented with a 7-bit binary number (a string of seven 0s or 1s). 128 possible characters are defined. It is what is often refereed to as text (as opposed to code) when referring to email or file types.
Back in the late 60s people started to use the symbols to make drawings. These eventually evolved into high art.
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ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII). The term is also loosely used to refer to text based visual art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font (non-proportional fonts, as on a traditional typewriter) such as Courier for presentation.
—Wikipedia
A lot of us will remember these from the local carnival (The Calgary Stampede in my case) booths that took your picture then printed it out using text.
This is not me. I can’t find mine.
But there are tons of great images out there and you can do all sorts of weird things with them. For example if you want see a nekkid lady you can find one buried in the source code of this post. (See here if you don’t know how.)
The possibilities are endless. See Chris.com’s ASCII Art page for literally hundreds of cool drawings.
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