Tag Archives: 1970s

Cityscape by Simon Parritt, 1972. From Typewriter Art.

Spread by Dorothy Yule in Upper & Lowercase Magazine Vol 2, No. 4, 1975. via

Moon song by Tristan Gray Hulse, 1973. From Typewriter Art.

Texture poem for the moons of stars by Peter Finch, 1971. From Typewriter Art.

By Steve McCaffery, from one of his CARNIVAL books, made some time between 1967-1975. Found here. More here.

The results are in for the First International Computer Drawn Dragon Contest, 1979! These are all PETSCII-graphics made on the Commodore PET. The winner, Tom Weller from Berkeley, California, typed these graphics by hand as PRINT statements in BASIC. The other contributions were made by Steve and Tom Wuttke, 9 and 12 years old.

From Recreational Computing Vol 8, Issue 43, November 1979.

These are IBM’s first computers: IBM 5100 (1975) and IBM 5110 (1978).

The 5100 had 256 characters but half of the characters were just underscored versions of the other half. It used IBM’s mega obscure EBCD encoding instead of ASCII. IBM 5110 dropped most of the underscored characters, which made room for semi-graphic characters. Encoding was changed to the slightly less obscure EBCDIC, and there were 14 localized character sets with 12 characters each.

Character set photos from Voidstar, where there are also more details about the character sets.

Algol (1970 and Textum 2 (1973) by Miroljub Todorović (Мирољуб Тодоровић), who founded the signalist movement.

BAMBI versus GODZILLA, by Dave Brett for the VT100 terminal. A comment on the video mentions seeing it in 1980, so this post is dated to 1979.

It’s based on an animation from 1969 by Marv Newland. This and other VT100-animations are available at textfiles.com.