The Ascii History

The ASCII code was created in the early 1960s, but was standardized in 1968 (it become a United States goverment standard). Early ascii art is seen on BBSes and seen in packs by underground ascii/ansi groups. ASCII is an acronym for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. In the 1960s there were many data communication codes that were competing for the US Standard, but ASCII won that competition as it had the PC Standard.

ASCII was defined by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 1968 as "ANSI Standard x3.4". It has also been described as ISO 636. It is a 7-bit code that has a maximum of 128 characters.

I would think that the real start of ASCII art was with the beginning of the BBS Softwares, but it took real off with the beginning of the Internet we know today. Internet was in the beginning (around 1960) meant to be for military purposes only, but it expanded to include universities and other educational institutions. In early 1990's, the World Wide Web was developed in the Switzerland. HTML (Hyper-Text Mark-Up Language) was first used there. People use the Internet mostly for emails (which is pure text, except for the new version of Outlook), ftp, irc and looking at web pages. They are all text if you dig hard enough. ASCII art was used to create diagrams and charts. It was also used for "fun" and to enhance and liven up the plain text messages (with small ascii animals or smileys).

ASCII art is also been used in the BBS (bulletin board system) scene and in the underground art groups. BBSs were developed in 1978 and became quite popular in the early 1980s. MUDs (multi-user dungeons) and MUGs (multi-user games) also became quite popular in the early years of the internet. These are all text based applications. So, if someone wanted to include a picture or diagram, it had to be created from text. Even today, BBSs, MUDs, and MUGs exist (many are still text based).

ASCII art is also used on mIRC (Internet Relay Chat). There are a number of chat channels that scroll colorized "ASCII" pop-ups or pictures. Often the pop-ups include the "extended" characters. This is rarely a problem since users are tied into the same mIRC software.

I would personal divide ASCII art into 2 main groups, the underground ascii and the mainstream ascii. The mainstream ascii refears to 2 styles of ascii and this is "line style" and "solid style". As you can see, "line styles" looks very similar to what we at the underground ascii scene refers to as "Oldschool" and "solid style" looks similar to "Newschool". The underground ascii scene also have "Block" style which is mostly ansi art without color (or similar). Block ascii is often used in nfo files for release groups. Oldschool and Newschool are often used for file_id.diz's, on bbs'es, on ftp sites and on shells as motd files.

I don't think ASCII art would die, not as far as people use it in Email, Ezines, on BBS'es, in MUDs/MUGs, and on MIRC, in webpage development, used in magazines, in advertising and on telnet and ftp sites, among others.