![]() Named after one of its prime offenders, the newsgroup was called. signature files of Usenet posters who were violating the four-line limit dictated by netiquette. There was even a newsgroup whose sole purpose was to mock the overly-elaborate. ![]() Here are a few of my favorites that have lingered in a forgotten file on my hard drive since 1994… People labored over their “signature” files, trying to make the end of their messages provide their contact information with a little extra pizzazz. In the early 1990s, the internet was still pretty much a text-based medium, offering basic services like email, Internet-Relayed Chat, and the ability to read (and leave) messages on newsgroups. So the early days of the internet still offered a fertile environment for budding ASCII artists. But it would still take several more years before the online world fully adopted web browsers (which offered the first easy way to combine actual images and text). A friend of mine pointed me to a remembrance of “Shawn-Da-Lay Boy Productions,” which created this masterpiece sometime in the late 1980s:īBS’s specialized in offering text files that could be downloaded - and those were also augmented from time to time with elaborate text art:Įventually, BBS’s were replaced by dial-up internet connections. Sometimes they augmented their artwork with color and the “extended” ANSI character set supported by most PCs of the day. ![]() The BBS.Ninja site has lovingly archived some early text art from 1981:Īs that decade rolled on, dial-up bulletin board systems embraced text art to welcome their unseen visitors - a kind of lost and unheralded folk art that was seen as a way make their services more fancy and visual. You can sense its potential in some of the earliest computer games - for example, the maps in “Star Trek” (1971), “Rogue” (1980) and “NetHack” (1987).Īnd inevitably, people couldn’t resist the challenge of trying to make art. One text art enthusiast points out some examples that appeared in Popular Science magazine between 19, “created by the artists on classic mechanical typewriter machines.” That’s several decades before the ASCII standard had even been defined.īut it seems indisputable that text art took on a whole new significance with the arrival of the first computers, since it offered a tempting new way of conveying information visually. Its preface claims to have identified “119 works by 65 practitioners from 18 countries.” (A PDF of the book is available online.)Īnd there’s also some other early examples. This image is from a now out-of-print work called “ Typewriter Art” (1975) by Alan Riddell, which tried to capture the earliest evolution of the artform from the 1890s through the 1970s. The book also cites the use of typewritten characters in the Bauhaus school of art during the 1920s “as a way of exploring composition and the three-dimensional space of the page.” “Victorian female stenographers pioneered a unique art form” notes a 2014 essay at, calling the book as “a beautiful allegory for how all technology is eventually co-opted as an unforeseen canvas for art and political statement.” Into the 20th Century Stacey - was included in the 2014 book “ Typewriter Art, A Modern Anthology,” which notes that the text artists of the 19th century had a different technique available to them: “feeding the paper into the rollers at numerous times, each at a different angle to allow the overprinting and fine-tuning of the image.” Last month someone calling themselves “Sourcerer Bot” attempted to trace the history of what we refer to today as text art, and actually dig up this spectacular example from 1898. ![]() ![]() George Herbert’s “Easter Wings” from 1633 ![]()
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