![]() ![]() This first version of the unicode spec included 78 ‘pictographs’, little graphic symbols that represented an idea or concept. The latest version of the Unicode standard has room for more than 128,000 characters including glyphs for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. ASCII only had space for 128 characters, which was enough for America and the rest of the anglophones, but what about Japanese, Arabic and that sort of thing? The first volume of the Unicode standard was published in 1991 and added much more space. Skipping ahead to the early 1990’s and the IT industry started to realise that ASCII didn’t leave enough space. In 1968, a 5x10 foot rendition later appeared in a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This image shot to fame when it was reproduced in the New York Times in October, 1967. Kenneth Knowlton and Leon Harmon worked on “Studies in Perception #1” in 1966 while they were at Bell Labs. The sort of stuff that evolved and went on to become all the special effects and computer animated films we see today. (You know, the crew that invented many of the foundations of our digital world: the transistor, the laser, the C programming language and unix.) It is a little amazing that this same corporation was pioneering computer-generated imargery at the same time. ![]() Some of the first experiments with ASCII art on computers emerged from Bell labs. ![]() ASCII or the ‘American Standard Code for Information Interchange’ quickly became a standard for how computers stored and shared information. The first computers could do text, and that was about it. You couldn’t e-mail images and many early printers substituted characters for other types of graphic marks. Early computers didn’t do pictures very well. Working within the constraints of automated typesetting systems is the necessity that shapes much of the form in ASCII art.įast forward to the 1960’s and we have the birth of ASCII art as it is nostalgically remembered by software developers. These pictures fall shy of earning the title of ASCII art because they are missing an important element - the machine. There is a slick 9th-century astronomical manuscript, featuring a whole stack of constellations fashioned from handwritten words. The idea of shaping words into pictures predates both the typewriter and the printing press. ![]()
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