ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author surveys the history and development of ASCII art from approximately 1960 to 1995. The author attempts to answer the following questions. Just how is ASCII art created? What are the main types of this art? In what ways is it new and unique, and in what ways is it related to certain earlier forms of artistic expression? Which aspects of computers and the Internet most fostered its development? How did it change over time? Who were the practitioners of this art and how did this change in the 1990s?. ASCII art is created and viewed in fixed-width or monospaced fonts, digital typefaces that display the same number of characters per inch, no matter what the width of the individual characters. ASCII art is a contemporary expression of a very old phenomenon. Despite the visual and encoding similarities between the two, RTTY art and ASCII art involve completely different technologies of transmission.
