Tag Archives: ebcdic

ASCII-portraits of Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson made with a UNIVAC in 1957. via (Technically not ASCII since it didn’t exist, but perhaps EBCDIC) h/t: Marcin Wichary

Colourized ASCII art at NASA using an IBM System/370 in 1981, via. Or… EBCDIC art?

garadinervi:

Frederick Hammersley, A Good Line is Hard to Beat, 1969, L. A. Louver, Venice, CA / Frederick Hammersley Foundation

ASCII art by Frederick Hammersley, 1969. Made on an IBM-computer (which used EBCDIC and not ASCII encoding), and:

The alphanumeric characters we could ‘draw’ with were: the alphabet, ten numerals and eleven symbols, such as periods, dashes, slashes, etc….

h/t: Robert Doerfler

A mandelbrot fractal calculated and printed as text on an IBM 1401 (1959) by Ken Shirriff. This computer does not use binary numbers and does not use bytes. It also does not use ASCII, but EBCDIC.

Keyboard layouts for the APL programming language, which uses symbols instead of words. It was based on EBCDIC and APL had its own set of symbols which in the 1960s was tricky for many screens, printers and platforms to deal with. Nowadays Unicode mostly supports it.

ASCII art by Sam Harbison, 1973. It uses a technique called overstriking, when you put characters on top of each other. This was common in typewriter art but was also used on screen for PLATO emoticons. More recently, glitch artists such as Glitchr & Mammifero are interesting examples.

Harbison’s process: 35mm camera -> film -> development -> densitometer -> 9-track magnetic tape -> FORTRAN & EBCDIC -> chain printer with overstriking -> strips of paper -> tape together -> success!

Post updated in 2024. Archived source.

Possibly made by Paul Gamble in 2013, possibly in EBCDIC and not ASCII.

Hypothetical Surface 1 by David R Garson, 1969. Computer prints made with IBM-stuff. Not sure, but it looks like text.

Autopoem Nr. 1 by Gerhard Stickel, 1965. Generated with an IBM 7090.