Untitled by Mats G. Bengtsson (1964)
Tag Archives: 1960s
Poem for Rosemarie by Charles Cameron, 1965.
Homage to John Cage by Bengt Emil Johnson, 1962.
Illustration from the teleprinter novel Informed Sources by Willard S. Bain, 1967.
Mona By The Numbers
Probably the earliest example of computer-generated text art, put together in 1964 by H. Philip Peterson:
In 1964, H. Philip Peterson of Control Data Corporation (CDC) used a CDC 3200 computer and a “flying-spot” scanner to create a digital representation of the Mona Lisa. The image contained 100,000 pixels that were plotted using numerals, sometimes overprinted, to approximate the required density and took 14 hours to complete.Similar digital images of popular art, cartoon characters, and even nudes adorned the walls of corporate offices, labs, and computer centers throughout the 1960s.
You can find out more about the ‘Digital Mona Lisa’ here, and there is an online viewer for closer inspection here
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.
Nude aka Computer Nudes aka Studies in Perception by Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon, 1966. While this is often called the first ASCII art piece, it doesn’t use any ASCII characters, and it was preceded by for example Digital Mona Lisa (1964).
Some hi-res scans here, thx to chicasyordinadores 4 the link. Also see this.
PlayPlax, a construction toy invented by Patrick Rylands for Trendon Toys, 1966.