While they are all on the Internet Archive, each volume is thousands of pages thick and rather hard to search. More from the extraordinary Miss E J Barclay from Cincinnati circa 1903 …Īpologies for not linking to the actual Inland Printer pages.Linotype post-cards from the June 1910 issue of The Inland Printer.Linotype artists were also doing this in the early part of the 20th century: Typewriter artists such as Bob Neill (who I think we’ve mentioned here before) worked it out manually. pbmtoascii has been doing it since 1988, which is almost retro. The image density of printed characters is fairly well known (or easy to work out). High resolution drum scanners came much later. It may have been possible to adapt this technology to produce low-density greyscale images. They also tended to be helical scan: the photodetector was driven by a lead screw, while the image to be scanned was attached to a rotating drum. There were scanners dating back to the 1960s and before, but they were analogue (for making duplicator stencils or transmitting images for facsimile reproduction). Would be interesting if it could be done by one. Would you like to add your own creations or can. But, of course you can also use them perfectly on Facebook, Instagram, or even Youtube Its completely normal for some characters to appear as squares. So you can use them in short messages, such as your Tweets or your Twitter name. But that is usually be done by an artist and not a computer. Unlike text art, these text images are created in one text line. With many characters printed between lines and over another. There is also (modern) typewriter art, which is even more impressive. “A time capsule of a time capsule from the dawn of computer animation” I also had a thread about animated ASCII art. And who remembers the kiosks? I don’t remember any in Germany. First I thought that the scanner must be the same size, but one line would be enough and then pulling the image upwards.īut they also needed a software, deciding what character to print.ĭoes anybody know on what computer it was done first, who did it, what was the scanner (patent?) and what the software (in the 60s and 80s maybe different). I assume that the source image was the same size than the print, so here ~30x80 cm. Unless if they were created manually (what I don’t think), there must be some hardware like a scanner. But I think the first images were printed in ~1961. I assume this was in the early 80s or late 70s. According wikipedia there were kiosks in malls where someone could have print it. This kind of art was famous in the 80s with the rise of the home computers and printers for everyone. Update (): Most of the site above are dead, and so I updated links to point to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.Printing a text file is easy, but I wonder how a photo or painting got into a computer/mainframe. If you manage to do something really cool like this, let me know. The site that actually directed me there was another blog - Øyvind Østlund ran an article about this little program that I believe he had written that converts an image to such ACSII art (Read the full article at Another very cool picture was posted on an Italian blog at If I didn’t know better, I might think it was actually a JPEG image. Check it out at It’s pretty big so you might have to scroll back an forth to get the full effect. The coolest one I’ve seen was the Linux penguin, created using a combination of these two techniques. However, modern computer also allow you to use colour as you create this ASCII creations. (I found some cool examples at With modern computers, this is more or less a lost art, as now, it’s so easy to open up a graphics editor, and get something that looks exactly like what you are trying to recreate. I, unfortunately, am not that skilled to produce an example, but these are the ones that I’ve always thought are really cool. These decorations can go even a step further, using the relative amounts of white space in the characters to form the image my shading, like you would in a black and white image.
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