ASCII by Sexii, probably 1990s.

We found a Goto80 logo in ne7’s new ASCII-colly, released today. Thanks, m8! cul8rz

Bildschirmtext was an interactive videotex system launched in West Germany in 1983 by the Deutsche Bundespost, the (West) German postal service. More info here.

Archeological maps in ASCII from 1975. A good way of visualizing spatial and other information simultaneously, and obviously a forerunner to both text adventure maps and modern cartography, as noted here.

Also check the typewriter maps, fat font for text-mode infovis & the virus map.

MZ-700-007 by hundredarms, 2011.

The 1800s Jacquard looms and its punched cards. Images from around the interwebz.

DotEater, Virus/Trojan (1998)

Viznut’s image-to-text conversion, using unscii-8 with 256 colours. Unscii is a set of Unicode-compatible fonts based on fonts from 80′s platforms and games. Download here.

Cascade (1987) is an early virus with the interesting payload of causing characters to fall to the bottom of the screen.

▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩ ▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩ ▩▩▩▩▩▩▨▤▤▤▤▤▤▤▩▩▩▩▩▩ ▩▩▩▩▩▨▨▤▤▤▤▤▤▤▩▩▩▩▩▩ ▩▩▩▩▨▨▨▤▤▤▤▤▤▤▩▩▩▩▩▩ ▩▩▩▨▨▨▨▤▤▤▤▤▤▤▩▩▩▩▩▩ ▩▩▨▨▨▨▨▤▤▤▤▤▤▤▩▩▩▩▩▩ ▩▩▨▨▨▨▨▤▤▤▤▤▤▤▩▩▩▩▩▩ ▩▩▨▨▨▨▨▦▦▦▦▦▦▦▩▩▩▩▩▩ ▩▩▨▨▨▨▦▦▦▦▦▦▦▩▩▩▩▩▩▩ ▩▩▨▨▨▦▦▦▦▦▦▦▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩ ▩▩▨▨▦▦▦▦▦▦▦▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩ ▩▩▨▦▦▦▦▦▦▦▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩ ▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩ ▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩▩

Awaawaa (2010) by Andrew Rosinski for Mostra Collettiva Estiva at bubblebyte.org.

See it in fullscreen++


♪    /
___/ ♪
[●|圖|●]  ♪

∧_∧ ♪
(´・ω・`)  ♪
( つ つ
(( (⌒ __) ))
し’ っ   »

Paper Aeroplanes‘s bag by Keira Rathbone.

Typwriter works by Elena Evgenevny in Russia in the 1920s and 1930s. Sourced and published by the magazine American Chordata, via. h/t Marcin.

PETSCII cat by Emily Pixels, via. Hi-res, with custom colours.

Haku – The Day (2014). Music video by Koki Ibukuro that combines Japanese Shift-JIS ASCII art with video footage. It combines image-to-ascii conversions with what looks like coded and manual graphics. Ibukuro developed a tool to convert video to proportional font shift-JIS ASCII.

(this post was updated with new links 2024-01-09)

Shift-JIS version of Self-portrait of seven fingers by Marc Chagall, 1913.

By Gatchaman

By Jan Anderzén. More here and here.

Thanks to Aegis for the suggestion.