I still dabble in ASCII art a bit, mostly in HTML comments and email headers. It’s kind of a difficult art-form to practice now, given that monospaced text is relatively rare.<p>Here’s are my pets in ASCII, who go out in the headers of my emails:<p><pre><code> .-"-.
^...^ |\./| /|^ ^|\
(=^I^=) )) =(^,^)=)) {/(_O_)\}
/ " \ (( | | (( _/ ^ \_))
( |"| ))) (|||))) (/ /'\ \)
==m m== =m'm= ""' '""</code></pre>
ASCII art (in slightly different form) was around before the 1990s.<p>Starting in the mid-70s there were photo booths in malls where you could get a photo taken and it would be converted into a very crude image dithered in digits, then printed onto a T-shirt. (1)<p>When I was learning typing on a manual typewriter in the very early 80s, there were books with rows of instructions like 'type 30 X's, then 10 spaces, then 20 Xs' which would result in primitive ASCII-like art of cats, owls and the like. I don't know how old they were.<p>(1) <a href="https://petapixel.com/2012/07/20/atari-compugraph-foto-an-ascii-art-photo-booth/" rel="nofollow">https://petapixel.com/2012/07/20/atari-compugraph-foto-an-as...</a>
ASCII art also played a big role in the early video walkthrough world too. Back then, sites like GameFAQs only accepted plain text documents for their guides, so ASCII art was the only way to add any form of images or decorations to your work, and make them look more interesting than a giant wall of text.<p>So the folks who wrote 50,000 word guides to the latest Zelda or Final Fantasy game also usually ended up becoming pretty good as ASCII art too.<p>Unfortunately, this era also died for various reasons. Most notably, the world of text based guides and simple message boards got replaced by a mix of wikis and sites that could actually support images, as well as video walkthroughs on sites like YouTube.<p>So when the relevance of GameFAQs and its ilk faded, so did the importance of ASCII art.
Found somewhere on stackoverflow many years ago and being my shell banner ever since:<p><pre><code> .-------.
| Hi |
'-------'
^ (\_/)
'----- (O.o)
(> <)</code></pre>
With judicious use of VT100 codes and sleep(), you can do animation as well:<p><pre><code> #!/usr/bin/env python3
from time import sleep
def width():
while True:
yield from range(3, 11)
yield from range(9, 1, -1)
print('(\\___/)\n(>O.o<)\n(>[||]<)\n(")_(")')
for w in width():
l = '(>[' + w * '|' + ']<)'
print(f'\x1b7\x1b[2A\x1b[K{l}\x1b8', end='', flush=True)
sleep(0.1)</code></pre>
Could using ASCII Art in the 21st century be said to be letting one's geek flag fly?<p><pre><code> ### ,d88b.d88b, +-------+
# 88888888888 | ASCII |
# `Y8888888Y' | |
# `Y888Y' | Art |
### `Y' +-------+</code></pre>
Just one moment before seeing this, I was looking at a large example (too big for a phone) on a NH user profile: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=some_furry">https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=some_furry</a><p>Ah, the Old Days, when life was simple and adulting was my parent's problem.
Just wanted to mention my favorite ASCII art ever - Simon Jansen's monumental ASCII art version of Star Wars from the late 1990s. Comes with a great FAQ as a bonus.<p><a href="https://www.asciimation.co.nz/" rel="nofollow">https://www.asciimation.co.nz/</a>
When did Unicode become popular on the internet? The article seems to claim it was around since the transition from BBSes started in 1995.<p>Also, a contributing factor to the decline not mentioned is the prevalence of non-monospace fonts.
Used this[1] for over twenty years for random things. An easy way to make quick text into different forms of ASCII art. I find it easier than using the `figlet`[2] command.<p>1. <a href="http://patorjk.com/software/taag/#p=display&f=Graffiti&t=Hacker%20News" rel="nofollow">http://patorjk.com/software/taag/#p=display&f=Graffiti&t=Hac...</a><p>2. <a href="http://www.figlet.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.figlet.org</a>
Wow, a reference to Legowelt and his cyberzine. Nice!
<a href="http://www.legowelt.org/shadowwolfissue1.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.legowelt.org/shadowwolfissue1.html</a>
I love ASCII art so much; my very first experience with computers was a DOS program that printed ASCII art pictures on my family's dot matrix printer. I could not even read yet and I was entranced.
My most upvoted ASCII art on HN. The Van Halen logo, RIP.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24703707">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24703707</a>