Wow, thank you for this. Today I learned why the slash-and-underscore ASCII art I came across looked so underwhelming on my PC, and that others were seeing it in all its glorious cohesion.
So cool and happy this is hitting the HN front page. :)<p>For more amiga ascii, have a look at the group impure which keeps releasing new art to this date:<p><a href="https://16colo.rs/group/impure" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://16colo.rs/group/impure</a>
The ASCII art I best remember was in Usenet signatures.<p>Elaborately done, usually to represent their username and HUGE.<p>I would snip conversations where appropriate but never an ASCII sig. They were just too good.
The profile a person (in the final colly and elsewhere in the article) is at least from 1948. "The Boy Mechanic" featured an article on "keyboard art" with the same profile in the lower-right corner of the page:<p><a href="https://laughingsquid.com/wp-content/uploads/keyboard-art.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://laughingsquid.com/wp-content/uploads/keyboard-art.jp...</a>
In addition to BBS, online text file, and earlier computer ASCII art, there was also IRC, where ASCII art would typically fit within a few lines.<p>Sometimes there were add-on scripts for IRC clients to generate these.<p>I got carried away with an IRC client I wrote, and added a bunch of ASCII art as standard commands. For example, one command would send ASCII art of an airplane towing a banner with the user-provided message.
I've always loved ASCII art and always get a bug to go hunt some old textfile down with really creative stuff in it just as a comfort thing I think.<p>also let's point out the awesome design aesthetic this site has, wow!
Note to the tldr; crowd: scroll down to the final "colly", a long scroll of ASCII art, which is well worth reading. It's extremely impressive.
Does anyone remember the name of the 1-bit, bitmapped art you could get in the Amiga terminal? I seemed to remember you would just cat a text file and graphics would appear.
I had never heard of collies before, this was fascinating! I'm very impressed with the finished product. The 'Baltic slime' graphic in particular was great.
Figure 12 illustrates how infuriatingly bad ASCII art looked on the IBM PC.<p>I used to run a utility in my AUTOEXEC.BAT that installed the Amiga font in the character ROM, but it still felt like we PC guys missed out on most of the cool stuff. And guess who won?