Wow, thank you for this. Today I learned why the slash-and-underscore ASCII art I came across looked so underwhelming on my PC, and that others were seeing it in all its glorious cohesion.

One of the few situations where CGA was arguably better than highres EGA or VGA

So cool and happy this is hitting the HN front page. :)

For more amiga ascii, have a look at the group impure which keeps releasing new art to this date:

https://16colo.rs/group/impure

The ASCII art I best remember was in Usenet signatures.

Elaborately done, usually to represent their username and HUGE.

I would snip conversations where appropriate but never an ASCII sig. They were just too good.

There’s an online museum of signatures collected from the Polish Usenet here: https://hell.pl/nina/newssigs/newssigs.htm

alt.ascii-art it's still alive.

Also, gopher://ascii.mozz.us:7070/1/ has some links to art.

Couldn't wipe the smile from this old man's face scrolling down the production part of the thesis.

The profile a person (in the final colly and elsewhere in the article) is at least from 1948. "The Boy Mechanic" featured an article on "keyboard art" with the same profile in the lower-right corner of the page:

https://laughingsquid.com/wp-content/uploads/keyboard-art.jp...

Good eye! I can't remember what was my initial inspiration (could have been the one you linked), but there is also a very similiar character in Pitman's typewriter manual (1893) which is featured in Barrie Tullett's Typewriter Art: A Modern Anthology.

https://twitter.com/readermeter/status/570459976759676928

In addition to BBS, online text file, and earlier computer ASCII art, there was also IRC, where ASCII art would typically fit within a few lines.

Sometimes there were add-on scripts for IRC clients to generate these.

I got carried away with an IRC client I wrote, and added a bunch of ASCII art as standard commands. For example, one command would send ASCII art of an airplane towing a banner with the user-provided message.

I've spent many nice evenings reading collies sent to me on disk by demoscene friends. Ah, it was so long ago…

Surprised an article of this depth didn't mention that the Topaz font changed between Kickstart 1 and 2.

I've always loved ASCII art and always get a bug to go hunt some old textfile down with really creative stuff in it just as a comfort thing I think.

also let's point out the awesome design aesthetic this site has, wow!

Note to the tldr; crowd: scroll down to the final "colly", a long scroll of ASCII art, which is well worth reading. It's extremely impressive.

it's inspired art

Does anyone remember the name of the 1-bit, bitmapped art you could get in the Amiga terminal? I seemed to remember you would just cat a text file and graphics would appear.

Yes. The Amiga text terminal allowed you to shift the top and left margin by single pixels using escape codes. After shifting, writing new text would not overwrite pixels outside the character cell, so by writing a line of text, and then shifting the margin down one pixel, writing another line of text, etc. you could get a complete bitmap image displayed.

Thank you! I wish I knew what the technique was called. I'd love to see some old screenshots.

I had never heard of collies before, this was fascinating! I'm very impressed with the finished product. The 'Baltic slime' graphic in particular was great.

I forgot there were column/line restrictions on FILE_ID.DIZ files

Figure 12 illustrates how infuriatingly bad ASCII art looked on the IBM PC.

I used to run a utility in my AUTOEXEC.BAT that installed the Amiga font in the character ROM, but it still felt like we PC guys missed out on most of the cool stuff. And guess who won?

Very true, we did miss out. The Amgia folks were sure to let us know about it any time we went to a BBS meet too! I did all my BBSing on a DOS PC. There was cool "newschool" ASCII and ANSI art designed for PCs too. At the time it felt magical opening up an art pack or a demo with chiptune music. Experiencing the underground coding and art scene definitely influenced my life a lot.

i always liked looking at ascii art. also, there is this open-source program i use called moebius to make ascii and ansi art for fun