#Ascii art fish how to#

You never know when you’re going to bump into it. In conclusion, from what I’ve seen and contrary to that Microsoft Tip of the Day, ASCII art isn’t dead, but it is perhaps enjoying a period of relaxed retirement punctuated by short and often violent bursts of activity. As computer capabilities improved, so the emoticon gave way to the emoji and it’s an interesting exercise to trace the lineage of some of the graphically rich modern emojis back to their plain text days. 'Face' Interpretation - :-) Ha, ha smile (-: Submitter is left-handed |-) Hee, hee |-D Ho, ho :-D Submitter talks too much :-> Hey, hey smirk :-( Boo hoo disappointed :-< Really sad :-C Really disappointed :-| Hmmm contemplation :-O Uh oh! :-o Submitter is shocked. Were written by Scott Fahlman in 1982, but they go even further back and first appeared on proprietary computer systems in the early 1970s. The original emoticons drew on the heritage of ASCII art and were essentially textual representations of a writer’s mood. Certainly, there’s an extensive curated selection on this Pinterest page, which, it has to be said, is fairly liberal in its definition of ASCII art. I was keen to find out if there’s an ASCII art image widely recognized to be the best ever example of the form, but the notion seems contrary to what must have been a culture of experimentation and iteration. Useful for transforming simple ASCII art diagrams into attractive illustrations, ditaa is a Java command-line utility that accepts diagrams like: There’s nothing wrong with being decorative and evocative of earlier times, but ASCII art has found some ingenious practical uses as well. Some people attributed the intervention to Bill Gates himself, who was suspected of being overzealous in promoting Microsoft’s proportional fonts. Many were up in arms at Microsoft’s apparent attempt to destroy three decades of art culture.

We suggest that you resist the temptation to send ASCII pictures with your e-mail. ASCII pictures don’t display correctly when the viewer is using proportional fonts - and a huge number of people (perhaps most) are using proportional fonts. You know, you see those pictures made up of numerous X’s, I’s, etc. To be pedantic, Knowlton’s early work was EBCDIC art (EBCDIC is an alternative form of character encoding used on large IBM computers) and took its inspiration from some of the very same themes that have occupied many artists through the ages.Īpparently, Microsoft declared ASCII art ‘dead’ in June 1998 when Internet Explorer’s Tip of the Day pronounced: CUTE, BUT USELESS Many people still like to use ASCII characters to draw pictures in their e-mail. The earliest known examples of recognizable ASCII art were created by a Bell Labs employee called Kenneth Knowlton in the mid-1960s, although it wouldn’t be until the late 1970s and early 1980s for it to become widespread, with the emergence of bulletin board systems (BBSs). For example, a sheet of paper could be manipulated through several directions and orientations, and the character spacing could be manually varied for effect. In fact, typewriter artists had access to several facilities not available to the later ASCII pioneers.

#Ascii art fish how to#

Decisions are made as to how to turn a letterform, or combination of letterforms, into a variety of tones”. As described in Typewriter Art, A Modern Anthology, the process involved “ … feeding the paper into the rollers at numerous times, each at a different angle to allow the overprinting and fine-tuning of the image. Yes, as well as the decorative border, the butterfly itself was created on a typewriter. Stacey in 1898 with nothing but a typewriter. The above ‘ mechanical drawing’ of a butterfly, for example, was produced by a lady called Flora F.F.